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Devil Incarnate: A Depraved Mercenary's Lifelong Swathe of Destruction
Par Wayne Thallon. 2007
Athol Visser, or 'Ivan the Terrible', is a ruthless torture technician who has maimed and murdered his way around the…
globe. He killed his first victim at 16, his last at 60, and, in between, has been a mercenary, drug smuggler, gun runner and spy. In his own words, Visser takes us on a chilling journey through his memory bank of horrors and gives his account of one of the most high-profile assassinations of the 1980s, that of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme. Visser's chaotic instincts led him from one deadly right-wing organisation to the next, before he rose to the highest ranks of the CCB, South Africa's foreign assassination unit. He was posted to London, where he drew up his plans to eliminate key opponents of apartheid. Devil Incarnate is the disturbing story of a degenerate, evil man who killed for pleasure and then adopted it as a profession. In the end, now ravaged by Aids, he has taken it upon himself to find out the reasons behind his unforgivable actions.The Devil: Britain's Most Feared Underworld Taxman
Par Graham Johnson. 2007
Drug dealers beware. The Devil is coming to get you. Gangster Stephen French invented the perfect crime: robbing drug barons…
of their huge fortunes. In SAS-style swoops, French raided their fortified mansions and tortured them with horrifying violence until they paid up. Through 'taxing' the richest and most powerful crimelords in the UK, he netted over £20 million.French was no ordinary criminal. He was a world-champion fighter, he studied psychology at university to master mind-control techniques, and he used the teachings of Machiavelli and samurai warriors to outwit his enemies. The Devil also reveals French's complex relationship with Curtis Warren, the wealthiest criminal in British history. The two were childhood pals, then partners and finally bitter enemies.Now a legitimate businessman, French built up a multimillion-pound empire. Having eventually turned his back on his former life, he is now seeking to set the record straight.The Criminal Alphabet: An A-Z of Prison Slang
Par Noel 'Razor' Smith. 2015
'I have spent almost 33 of the last 53 years in and out of prison, but mainly in. I was…
a juvenile offender back in the mid 1970s and went on to become an adult prisoner in the 1980s and beyond. My shortest prison sentence was 7 days (for criminal damage) and my longest sentence was life (for bank robbery and possession of firearms). I have 58 criminal convictions for everything from attempted theft to armed robbery and prison escape, and I was a career criminal for most of my life. What I do not know about criminal and prison slang could be written on the back of a postage stamp and still leave room for The Lord's Prayer ...'From ex-professional bank robber and bestselling author Noel Smith, this is the most authoritative dictionary of criminal slang out there - and an unmissable journey, through words, into the heart of the criminal world.Criminal: The Truth About Why People Do Bad Things
Par Tom Gash. 2016
The way we see and understand crime falls into two types of story that, in essence, have been told and…
retold many times throughout human history - in fiction, as in fact. Criminality is either a selfish choice, an aberration; or a forced choice, the product of social factors. These two stories continue to dominate both our views of and responses to crime. And, says Tom Gash, they are completely wrong. In seeking to dispel the myths that surround and inform our views of crime, Criminal argues that our obsession with 'big arguments' about crime's causes can lead us to mistake individual cases as proof of universal rules. How, he asks, can we suspend our knee-jerk reactions, and begin to understand crime for what it is: as a risk that can be managed and reduced.Crimelord: The True Story of Tam McGraw
Par David Leslie. 2005
Crimelord is the gripping life story of elusive multimillionaire gangster Tam McGraw. A notorious criminal kingpin, McGraw has risen from…
extreme poverty in the East End of Glasgow to become one of Scotland's wealthiest men. When hash started to flood into Scotland from the late 1980s onwards, suspicion centred on McGraw, leader of the infamous Barlanark Team. After a two-year surveillance operation, police discovered the drug had been hidden in buses carrying young footballers and deprived Glasgow families on free holidays abroad. It was a scam reminiscent of the movie The Italian Job, only this time Scots kids had been sitting on hash worth over £40 million. Police claimed McGraw was the financier and mastermind but in 1998 a jury declared him innocent while other suspects were jailed. As McGraw refuses to discuss his life publicly, his remarkable tale is told through friends, fellow crooks and the occasional rival. It is an outrageous, often hilarious, true gangster story.Deadly Divisions: The Spectre Chronicles
Par Paul Ferris, Reg McKay. 2002
Glasgow, 1989. James Addison, aka Addie, has been a very busy man. Wanted for every type of crime for over…
a decade, there is only one hitch - he has never been seen, let alone caught. So, who or what is Addie? Does he even exist?When a small-time moneylender pimp is shot down on a Glasgow street, it seems to be just another gangland murder. But not for Andy Grimes, overseer of much of the city's prostitution, drug dealing and protection rackets - and the dead man's brother. When word leaks out that Addie is the killer, Grimes calls in his police allies and musters his troops. On the case is DCI Alex Birse, and old-time cop, as crooked as he is vicious. He has been after Addie for years and never got close. As the streets of Glasgow heave with police and gangsters, over in Berlin the Wall is coming down. At this time of great change, opportunity and uncertainty, the two cities are linked by loot – Bearer Bonds to be precise. Back in Glasgow, while pulling a scam on an old Jewish couple, one of Grimes' men, Angie the Gopher, finds a biscuit tin full of Bearer Bonds issued in Germany before the Second World War. Angie smells money – the bonds could be worth millions – and he scuttles back to tell his boss. Now the chase is on. Who gets the bonds? How much are they worth? Who perishes along the way? For the answers you'll have to rely on Addie. But can they catch him? The last line will reveal all . . . maybe.Cut-Throat: The Vicious World of Rod McLean - Mercenary, Gun-Runner and International Drug Baron
Par Wayne Thallon. 2005
Fact is often stranger than fiction, and when Rod McLean, an escaped drug baron and alleged MI6 agent, was mysteriously…
found dead in a London flat after two months on the run, even Hollywood couldn't have scripted it better.McLean had only served seven years of his twenty-eight-year sentence he received following a 1996 sting operation off the Caithness coast in which a Customs officer lost his life. Despite being described as one of the most ruthless and important figures on the country's drug scene, McLean had found his security status downgraded from Category A to D and had been transferred to HMP Leyhill, an open prison which had seen 82 prisoners escape in 2002 alone. Shortly after the media had accused the security services of helping him to escape, McLean was found – dead. But not only did it take the Metropolitan Police 29 days to make the news public, it also took them that long to inform Avon and Somerset - the very police force who were still trying to recapture him. Why? Who was McLean and what made him so important? So important, in fact, that the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, had been compelled to order a report into his disappearance, much of which remains secret to this day. Cut-Throat is a truly unique account of Rod McLean's life and death, told in the first person using material from McLean's own hand. Whether as a mercenary in the Congo, an armed robber in Newcastle or as an international drug-smuggler and gun-runner who operated where few others have dared, McLean will take you through his life as he struggles against the darkest realms of humanity and himself until the very end, an end which overshadows the greatest secret of all – not of how he died, but of how he lived.Crossing the Line: Losing Your Mind as an Undercover Cop
Par Christian Plowman. 2013
As he rose through the ranks of various departments of the Metropolitan Police, Christian Plowman dreamt of being an undercover…
cop. When he finally achieved his ambition, becoming one an elite group of officers, the reality of covert work turned his life into a nightmare.To catch criminals, Christian bought and sold drugs with taxpayers’ money, been beaten up, arrested at gunpoint and barricaded in a pub by a gang of marauding gypsies – all in a day’s work. At one stage, he was running almost a dozen mobile phones to keep track of his different identities and had so many aliases that he nearly forgot who he was. He put his life on the line for the job but was to find that being the ‘best of the best’ wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The pressure became so intense that he even contemplated suicide.Crossing the Line is a visceral, gripping account of what it really takes to be an undercover cop. It exposes how the Met conducts its business behind the scenes and reveals the harsh realities of modern covert police work.Crooked Talk: Five Hundred Years of the Language of Crime
Par Jonathon Green. 2012
The language of crime has a long and venerable history - in fact, the first collection of words specifically used…
by criminals, Hye-Way to the Spittel House, dates from as early as 1531. Jonathon Green is our national expert on slang, and in Crooked Talk he looks at five hundred years of crooks and conmen - from the hedge-creepers and counterfeit cranks of the sixteenth century to the blaggers and burners of the twenty-first - as well as the swag, the hideouts, the getaway vehicles and the 'tools of the trade'. Not to mention a substantial detour into the world of prisons that faced those unlucky enough to be caught by the boys in blue. If you have ever wondered when the police were first referred to as pigs, why prison guards became known as redraws, or what precisely the subtle art of dipology involves, then this book has all the answers.The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare
Par Jeff Farrell, Paul Keany. 2012
‘It won’t happen to me. That’s what I thought when I got on the plane to Venezuela. But it did…
– I got caught.’Caught smuggling half a million euros’ worth of cocaine, Paul Keany was sexually assaulted by Venezuelan anti-drugs officers before being sentenced to eight years in the notorious Los Teques prison outside Caracas. There he was plunged into a nightmarish world of coke-fuelled killings, gun battles, stabbings, extortion and forced hunger strikes until finally, just over two years into his sentence, he gained early parole and embarked on a daring escape from South America . . .Aided by his extensive prison diaries, Keany reveals the true horror of life inside Los Teques: a shocking underworld behind bars where inmates pay protection money to stay alive, prostitutes do the rounds and vast amounts of cocaine are smuggled in for cell-block bosses to sell on to prisoners for huge profits. The Cocaine Diaries is a remarkable story, told by Keany with honesty, courage and even humour, despite knowing that every day behind bars might have been his last.Clubland UK: On the Door in the Rave Era
Par Steven McLaughlin. 2013
Clubland UK is a story of violent men and the worlds they inhabit. At the height of the hedonistic ’90s…
rave era, Steven McLaughlin policed some of Blackpool’s busiest seafront clubs on chaotic nights, as the virulent dance and drug craze exploded onto the scene. From the front line, he witnessed the dark underbelly of clubland culture and the predatory menace lurking beneath the smiley-face T-shirts, pilled-up clubbers and frantically waving arms. He saw people revel in it; he saw people excel in it; he saw people profit in it; and he saw people suffer in it. Because sometimes being ‘a face’ in clubland demands the highest price of all. From small-town gyms to big-time steroid dealers, from martial-arts myths to back-alley fights, door wars and gang grudges in Britain's gaudiest seaside town, Clubland UK is a story that takes the reader into a twilight world where testosterone, brotherhood, ego and a warrior mentality all collide in a bruising mess. This book is a must-read trip into the dark side of the dance decade, a roller-coaster ride of pills and blood-spilling thrills, where agony and ecstasy co-exist in a blurred neon blaze.Chasing Killers: Three Decades of Cracking Crime in the UK's Murder Capital
Par Joe Jackson. 2009
Glasgow is known as the murder capital of Britain and no one understands why better than Joe Jackson. For over…
30 years, Jackson worked the crime beat, first as a uniformed cop then as a seasoned murder squad detective. In this hard-hitting memoir of his most memorable cases, he reveals the reality behind chasing killers and other crooks in 'No Mean City'.As a young cop, Jackson was threatened by Glasgow's most ruthless gangster, Arthur Thomson, and, as a fresh detective, he took part in the hunt for Bible John, Glasgow's most shadowy serial killer. He locked up more than his fair share of paedophiles and sex beasts along the way and, as a veteran Senior Investigating Officer, he cracked the hardest homicide nut there is: a murder without a body. Jackson's investigations have grabbed headlines, while his 'collars' have filled jails.Chasing Killers will shock readers with its behind-the-scenes look at how murder probes are run. Every case is related with candour and humour, and is laced with the kind of detail that only an expert can provide. Joe Jackson has been called the real-life Taggart, but this is no TV fantasy - this is real city police work: concrete hard, soot black and blood red.The Cartel: The Inside Story of Britain's Biggest Drugs Gang
Par Graham Johnson. 2012
A global workforce. Billions in sales. But, unlike Tesco or BP, few have heard of it. The Cartel is Britain’s…
biggest drugs organisation, a shadowy network stretching from the freezing, fog-banks of the Mersey to the glittering marinas of Marbella, from the coffee shops of Amsterdam to the trading floors of Canary Wharf. Run by godfathers as rich as Branson but kept in line by a new generation of teenage killers. Here is the inside story.You've seen Manhunt, now read Geoffrey Wansell's chilling portrait of notorious serial killer Levi Bellfield- the only man in modern…
British legal history to be given two whole-life sentences.On 23 Jun 2011 the convicted double-murderer Levi Bellfield was found guilty of the murder of 13-year-old school girl Milly Dowler.Milly disappeared on her way home from school in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey in 2002. Six months later her body was discovered many miles away. A massive police investigation, the largest manhunt in Surrey's history, got nowhere. Only when nightclub bouncer and bare-knuckle boxer Levi Bellfield was arrested for the murder of another young woman did it become clear to police that they had a serial killer on their hands.This is the full story of the murders, the victims and the pain-staking nine-year investigation and trial by police and prosecutors. It tells of Bellfield's terrifying, controlling personality - a man who went from charming to monstrous in the blink of an eye - and his depraved stalking of young women.Geoffrey Wansell has been acknowledged as one of Britain's leading authorities on serial killers. He was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize (now the Costa Book Award) for his biography of Terence Rattigan, and was appointed by the Official Solicitor to the Supreme Court to write the biography of Gloucester-based serial killer Frederick West.Burke and Hare: The Year of the Ghouls
Par Brian Bailey. 2002
'My Lord, You are aware that, at this moment, the public feeling is strongly excited against the perpetrators of the…
late foul and cold blooded murders that have taken place in the very centre of a populous and civilised city . . . Your Lordship is aware, that in all civilized nations, blood calls for blood . . .'From ' Letter to the Lord Advocate . . . By The Echo of Surgeons' Square'Early nineteenth century Edinburgh was gripped by fear of body snatchers. New graves were constantly under threat from unscrupulous ghouls keen to profit from the medical school's voracious appetite for corpses. In 1828, Burke and Hare, a pair of opportunistic low-lives, took the practice to a new extreme. They murdered at least 16 innocent victims, including a 12-year-old boy, in the name of medical science - and the freshness of the corpses they delivered for dissection earned them extra money.The names of Burke and Hare have become synonymous with body-snatching, but the true details of their crimes have been obscured by mythology and questions still surround the case. In Enlightenment Edinburgh, how were Burke and Hare able to carry on their repulsive and murderous trade undetected for so long? Why was only one of the homicidal due brought to justice? And what were the roles of Burke and Hare's common-law wives, the medical students who took delivery of the corpses and Dr Robert Knox, the distinguished teacher of anatomy whose dissecting table was the final resting place of the unfortunate victims?Bailey reveals a sordid side to a society which was famed for its intellectual and progressive thinking, yet depended on predatory criminals for the advance of medical knowledge. In this compulsive and absorbing book, the evidence is thoroughly re-examined - and startling conclusions are reached.Bouncers and Bodyguards: Tales from a Twilight World
Par Robin Barratt. 2008
Bouncers and Bodyguards is a collection of astonishing true stories about the tough world of personal protection and nightclub doors…
from some of Britain's most notorious figures.Read how Charlie Bronson helped his friends out on the doors of his local in the early '70s before being banged up for well over 30 years; how Dave Courtney misses the violent world of the doors; how ex-football hooligan Mickey Francis ran most of Manchester's doors back in the '80s; and how an ex-Foreign Legion bodyguard spent over a week cooped up in a bleak warehouse guarding Iraqi votes in central Baghdad.By turns funny, sad and shocking, these candid accounts were written exclusively for this publication by individuals who have spent much of their working lives in what is a volatile, violent and frequently unpredictable industry.Compiled by former bodyguard, ex-mercenary and well-known nightclub bouncer Robin Barratt, Bouncers and Bodyguards is an exposé of an infamous twilight world about which rumours have often circulated but the truth has never really been uncovered - until now.Born Fighter
Par Reg Kray. 1990
_______The shocking, gripping autobiography from one of the UK's most infamous criminals and gang leaders, and one half of the…
legendary Kray Twins, Reggie Kray.Reggie Kray is one of Britain's most notorious criminals. Together with his brother Ronnie, he rose through the ranks of London's East End gangland to run an evil empire of vice and villainy. But, after half a lifetime behind bars, Reg wants to set the record straight. Here, in his own words, is the true story of his life as one half of a criminal double act with his brother Ronnie, the chilling career of two street-wise kids who became standard-bearers of violence - from fire-bombings to shootings and cold-blooded murder. But here too is the inner voice of a one-time mobster who learned compassion through his own struggle to come to terms with a life sentence.Bonded by Blood: Murder and Intrigue in the Essex Ganglands
Par Bernard O'Mahoney. 2006
Bernard O'Mahoney was a key member of the Essex Boys firm - one of the most violent criminal gangs in…
Britain. In December 1995, the three leaders of the gang were executed as they sat in their Range Rover down a deserted farm track. For many, this meant that the horror of the gang's brutal reign was over.For Jack Whomes and Michael Steele, the nightmare had just begun. Convicted of the murders on the word of a supergrass, these two men have spent more than a decade in prison for crimes they claim they did not commit. In Bonded by Blood, O'Mahoney goes back to exorcise his ghosts and lay the past to rest. He returns to the scene of the murders and relives the bloody encounters that marked his time as a gang member.Divided by greed, bonded by the blood of their victims, the Essex Boys' rise to the top of the criminal underworld was as dramatic as their final fall.Blood on the Streets: A Murderous History of Limerick
Par Anthony Galvin. 2013
Limerick is known as the Treaty City, commemorating the site where peace was made during one of Ireland’s bloody wars.…
However, since the 1980s the city’s reputation has been tainted by gang feuds, earning it the infamous nickname ‘Stab City’.In Blood on the Streets, Anthony Galvin explores the many notorious murders that have been perpetrated in the city over the years, including the case of Deborah Hannon, who, along with her father’s lover, Suzanne Reddan, hacked her best friend to death with a Stanley knife. Galvin recounts the murder of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe, shot by the IRA during a botched armed robbery, and the story of the last man hanged in Ireland following his conviction of the rape and murder of a nurse on a quiet suburban road.Blood on the Streets also spotlights the city’s hit men, including the only hit man in the country to have been convicted of murder twice, and delves into some of the most notorious of the recent gangland killings.The Black Widower: The Life and Crimes of a Sociopathic Killer
Par Charles Lavery. 2012
He drugged his first wife and staged a fireball car crash, collecting a £200,000 insurance payout.He cheated his second wife…
of her life savings and attempted to kill her in a copycat crash.He faked cancer to dupe his third victim into a bigamous marriage, plotting her murder to steal her inheritance.He is Malcolm Webster: The Black Widower.After seventeen years of deception and brutality, Webster was finally jailed for thirty years in July 2011 at the climax of one of the longest trials in Scottish legal history. In this chilling book, award-winning journalist Charles Lavery documents the Black Widower’s life and crimes, giving a compelling insight into the mind of a man who killed for money and attempted to cover his tracks with drugs and fire.