As the judge entered, I duly handed the toy gun up to His Honour. He examined it carefully from all angles, paying particular attention to the red stopper. I wished the ground would eat me up. Surely I was in for another roasting, this time for bringing charges against this inept villain.
‘Stand up, Mr Chiggers,’ ordered the judge.
Gus stood.
The judge then went through the horrors that befall people faced with armed gunmen and how some never recover. He took into account the early guilty plea, the crackpot getaway strategy, the paltry amount gained and the robber’s demeanour throughout. He then turned to the gun.
‘I can clearly see that, by this red stopper, this gun is nothing but a toy; incapable of harming anyone.’
Here it comes, I thought. I put on my best sheepish look.
‘However neither I nor you know how other people would react when such a weapon is pointed at them. You are lucky that the person you chose to rob did not fall for it. Others might have. Therefore I judge this to be a most serious offence carried out in a crowded place in the middle of the day. Despite all the mitigation, I have no option but to sentence you to four years’ imprisonment. Jailer, take him down.’
I saw the confused look in Gus’s eyes and the whispered apology as he went down the steps. I spared him some sympathy, conscious that only then had he grasped the stupidity of his actions.
Farcical as Chiggers’ escapade was, Judge Gower was right of course. Not even a highly trained firearms officer will claim to be able to determine a fake gun from a real one at a glance. Sometimes they have to make a split-second decision whether or not to shoot someone brandishing a weapon.
At the New Scotland Yard Crime Museum, the curator, an ex-detective himself, put Peter James through a test. Standing just ten feet away he pulled a gun from inside a box on Peter, calling ‘Real or fake?’ There was a one-second pause. ‘You’re dead.’ No time to decide. No way of telling. That was play-acting, but cops have to decide in real life. And they take no chances.
5: Bad Business
Never underestimate the power of the criminal mind.
Crime can realize profits that would shame many FTSE 100 companies. With the international drugs market worth an estimated £320 billion per year, it’s no surprise that disrupting and dismantling organized crime has been one of the most enduring challenges and priorities for governments across the world in recent times.
Major league criminals operate on a truly global scale. Grace finds himself reflecting, while waiting for Amis Smallbone to emerge from a pub full of old-world villains in Not Dead Yet, on how local criminal rivalries in Brighton had been surpassed by the pressure brought by faceless yet ruthless overseas mobsters.
A huge number of people amass fortunes through top-level crime. It would be foolish, however, to assume that comes from next to no effort. Far from it. Only the strong survive. Weak, lazy criminals wither into oblivion, jail or an early grave thanks to turf wars and smarter opposition.
To be a successful criminal requires acute business acumen worthy of any multinational conglomerate’s boardroom. A forensic understanding of profit margins, risks, opportunities, markets and one’s competitors is the lifeblood of all successful entrepreneurs, on whichever side of the law they operate.
Business guru Alan Deutschman coined the oft-repeated catchphrase ‘Change or Die’. Indeed, in 2007 he published a book on this philosophy. Never has this been taken quite so literally as in the criminal world. Villains who fail to adapt to keep one step ahead of the law, to have the edge over their rivals or to capitalize on new opportunities are never far from a cell door or an early grave.
Brighton and Hove has always been a nest of enterprising speculators. The vibrancy of the place, coupled with a ubiquitous can-do attitude, means that if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere. There is a reason why it features in the www.startups.co.uk list of the ‘top twenty places in the country to start a business’.
The knocker boys were probably the first criminally minded modern-day chancers to get rich in the city, but many have followed in their footsteps.
David Henty and Clifford Wake could never be accused of being small-time crooks. Friends from school, they had a hunger that burned inside them. Their desire to accumulate colossal wealth was matched only by their antipathy to taxes. They felt that faceless government bureaucrats had no right to fritter away the money they earned through the sweat of their brows. No, only they should decide how their profits should be spent.
Both in their early thirties, Henty and Wake had served long and mainly successful apprenticeships climbing the greasy pole of Brighton’s criminal underclass. Henty had been brought up in Moulsecoomb, a compact council estate, developed after the First World War as a site for ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’. It is a warren of narrow streets with rows of small semis crammed along its pavements. Henty used to be sent out from there by his father on burgling errands. He learned to trust no-one, though, as even his own dad would short-change him.
They would try any scam from antique theft, stealing and selling on cars to manufacturing forged vehicle documents. They knew how to spot the chance to make a fast buck. Henty came from a family who were well known in the antique and art world, hence his expertise and reputation preceded him. Both, though, were only too aware that rivalries, capture and incarceration were all occupational hazards.
But beneath all this, they were businessmen. They carefully weighed up the risks, forecast their turnover and took their decisions based on cold, calculated assessment. Was the gain worth the pain?
Grace has to deal with people from across the sociological spectrum. In Looking Good Dead, he considers the various layers — mainly defined by wealth — that make up the diverse bulk of the city. He reflects on the contrast between the genteel retired set whiling their days away watching Sussex play cricket at the County Ground to those of a similar age who by day beg for their next meal, and by night bed down in windswept seafront shelters. He has also been around long enough to know that the criminal classes range from subsistence thieves who melt into the background at the first sign of a police car to the ones at the top of their game living a life of faux respectability in their mansions behind security gates and high-walled perimeters in the Dyke Road Avenue area. Henty and Wake made it their life’s ambition to claw their way up this ladder, and no law was going to stop them.
In the early 1990s, the UK was at the tail end of a property boom. Vendors were still making silly money on get-rich-quick schemes buying and selling houses. Mortgage companies couldn’t keep up with business and no-one looked too carefully at how credit-worthy applicants actually were. The risks were low for financiers as, if the borrowers failed to pay, the property in question would have soared in value and they would be quids in.
David Henty had never earned an honest buck in his life. He certainly didn’t have payslips or audited accounts to prove his income. That did not seem to matter to the bank manager who chose to lend him £175k — 100 per cent of the purchase price — to buy the prestigious 1 Wykeham Terrace. Providing Henty could make the monthly payments, cash of course, and the property continued its meteoric rise in value, how could he lose?
Many of Brighton’s villains live in swanky mock-Tudor houses in Hove — on streets such as Dyke Road Avenue and Shirley Drive, which Glenn Branson in Dead Man’s Time nicknamed ‘Nob Hill’. Grace, in Dead Like You, shares Branson’s skewed opinion of its residents, musing that while most were squeaky-clean its garish opulence also attracted some of the city’s wealthy ne’er-do-wells.