Powder Wars (2 page)

I noticed that Harriet even found out when the floorwalkers sloped off for a sly ciggie. As they smoked, she went to work clearing the shop out. If they went to the toilet, they'd come back to major crime scene.

My grandma was a ‘wrapper'. That just meant being able to compress several items of clothing into a ball very quickly. But there was a bit of an art to it, in all fairness.

We went into a department store called T.J. Hughes. I paid close attention to what was going on.

She swiped four woollen suits off've a rail and wrapped them into a tight ball. Roseline bagged them into a big, glossy paper bag and left it on the floor by a rail. Later, when we were off the scene, my Auntie Joan, who was Billy Grimwood's wife, picked it up and carried it out. That was her job – a carrier-outer. To her, it was no different than working in a factory.

Right over to the kiddies' clothes section then. To ordinary folks and that we just looked like a respectable family out shopping, in all fairness. Harriet made me try on school uniforms while they cleaned it out. That was my introduction into organised crime.

Following his apprenticeship as a shoplifter, Paul was taught how the men of the family went about their business as blaggers, safe-crackers and commercial burglars. He was given a ringside seat at their monthly planning meetings around a flimsy Formica table in the prefab's cramped kitchen.

Jostling for space and hunched over the crude drawings laid out before them, the chain-smoking gangsters sat awkwardly on spindly dining-chairs and discussed getaway routes, the amount of gelignite to be deployed and the drop-off point for the fences on completion of the job, if there was anything aside cash involved.

Paul soaked it up. He was impressed. Grimwood was a striking figure. When the conversation got heavy, like when his father Harold revealed how Grimwood had killed a rival gangster and buried him on a nearby wasteground, his uncles would tell him to ‘fuck off' for a while. But mostly it was routine business, like the systematic robbing of Liverpool docks.

To Grimwood's crew, having Liverpool docks on their doorstep was like having a free cash machine at the end of the street. It was a constant source of plunder. A wide-open, eight-mile-long warehouse stuffed with treasures beyond their wildest dreams. Lorry loads of whisky, mountains of coffee, transporters piled high with new cars, holds full of fresh produce, clothes, televisions, leather shoes, canned foods, fertiliser, electrical goods – you name it, Britain's ration-starved, consumer-hungry black market couldn't get enough of it.

The icing on the cake was that waterfront robberies were largely risk free. The docks, in the local parlance, were totally ‘boxed off' – the workers who ran them were on the take and ‘onside'. Dockers, lorry drivers and security guards were mostly friends and family into making a few quid by putting up tasty work, turning a blind eye and ‘rolling over' on put-up raids.

Grimwood robbed the docks blind. And when the money ran out he robbed them some more. As fast as he could clean them out, ships from the four corners of the Empire and the factories of Northern England filled them up again. Seemingly, the warehouses never ran dry. It was a dream enterprise and it was big business.

In the oak-panelled cabin boardrooms of the marine insurers, from the Liver Building to Lloyds of London, eyebrows were being raised at the horrific attrition rate; not that the plunder was a new phenomenon. The large-scale organised ransacking of stores had started ten to fifteen years before during the Second World War, when the US Army had been forced to create special cadres to stop the raiders stealing army cigarettes and looting bombed warehouses. But by the 1950s the problem was putting the economic viability of Liverpool's port at risk.

To beat the raiders, exporters like Timpson's shoes began splitting up their cargoes – left feet in one ship, right on another, so that the hijackers were left with lorryloads of stolen but unsellable single-foot shoes. In a desperate bid to stop the haemorrhaging, the electrical goods company Remington removed the magnetic motors from their top-of-the range razors and stored them in separate warehouses, miles apart from their plastic cases. But the raiders simply slipped the cargo handlers bigger bribes to pinpoint the exact locations of the various components, so that they could be robbed piecemeal and reassembled later.

Finally, in the mid-'60s, faced with huge losses from theft, the Port Authority of Liverpool invested millions of pounds into containerisation – the transport of cargo in relatively secure steel containers. But the mobs simply switched from robbing the fenced-in dock areas to the hundreds of less-secure holding warehouses that funnelled unpackaged goods into them, scattered all over the northwest. It was no surprise that the Grimes family prefab became an Aladdin's Cave of stolen goods.

PAUL: There were racks of new American suits in the wardrobes and crates of single malt Scotch off've the docks, three-deep up the walls. When televisions came out there were blocks of them up to the roof. You had to climb over them to get out the door. Bowls full of jewellery had off from the safes and that spilled over under the bed. It got so chocca that we were forced to move into our grandma's house. There was no room for us to sleep; the place was so rammed tight with swag.

Grimwood was the top boy. He was a blagger. Ronnie was a grafter, into warehouses and factories and that. Grimwood wore a tuxedo, even if he was going down to the local boozer and that. He was that rough, in all fairness. He used to stand over his wife while she ironed his white shirts. If it wasn't done right, he'd throw it back in her face and call her a piece of shit.

It was a bit thingio, in all fairness. But it's one of them, isn't it? What can you do, when you're just a kiddie? But on the street everyone loved him. The dockers loved him because he always boxed them off if he had a good touch off've one of their tips. The card-markers loved him; if he blew up a safe it was get paid for them. And the crews loved him because he put dough in their backbins and stopped other villains from robbing it off them.

He was like a peacemaker for the underworld. Got a beef with a rival door team? Go see Billy, he'll straighten it out. Got a witness giving evidence against you? Have a word with Billy. He'll make sure they don't turn up in court. But if you fucked up, Billy wouldn't think twice about shooting a guy.

Don't know how many people he plugged during his life but I remember my dad and the crew talking in the kitchen about him – pure hushed tones and all that – about killing a villain who had done his head in over something or other. Pure double-clicked the poor cunt. End of. Buried him on the kiddies' playground up the road.

They sat round the kitchen table setting up jobs, saying: ‘What do we need?' Everyone had their own tools. Grimwood always had the jelly [gelignite]. To explain the tools and the mad vans they used and that, they pretended that they were a firm of steeplejacks, on the way to knock down a chimley [chimney] and that. That was their cover.

To make it look legit, every now and again they were forced to put in tenders for legit demolition jobs. One time they actually won a contract – to pull down Liverpool's overhead railway. Shocked they were. It was a big contract. It was in the papers that they'd won it. Billy was on a downer about it. It meant that the crew might actually have to do some proper work. They tried very hard to
lose
that contract, believe you me.

There was villains coming and going all day and night. Talking about how they'd had this lorry off or how they'd broken into such and such a bonded warehouse. Some of them were pretty heavy, in all fairness. Pure players of the day. May have only been in our kennel, but in criminal terms they were sitting at the top of the tree where the fairies lived. If you were running with Billy's crew, then you'd made it. There were hijackers who'd just had off a lorry load of ciggies, someone who touched lucky on a warehouse full of canned salmon or meat. All that carry on.

I looked. I listened. Was only one topic of conversation, to be fair. Crime. Even for the kiddies. But I didn't learn a lot, to tell you truth. A lot of it was in my genes already. By the time we got to bed, the police would be round, kicking in the doors and all of that ballyhoo. You'd be asleep in bed, the next thing the door was being kicked in, the busies were turning the place over looking for this and that.

If my dad was on the run, my ma had to graft all the time to keep us afloat. In the day she shoplifted and that. In the evenings she would be at home fencing the gear and, of a night, she went out. She ran a few
shibeens
. They were illegal nightclubs, which were all the go at the time. She was a very busy woman, to be fair.

Paul's schooling in the dark arts was made easier after his normal education was abandoned at an early age. Born with the debilitating bone disease osteomyelitis, he had been in and out of hospital for leg operations since he could walk. Harriet and the family simply saw the down time as an opportunity for him to learn how to be a gangster.

Despite his disability, Paul was a natural fighter with a stocky build and an abnormal tolerance for pain. He quickly became the ‘cock' of his Mount Vernon neighbourhood. He noticed, like Grimwood, that fear was an effective instrument for managing the ragged unpredictability of street life. There was also the respect premium that accompanied his willingness to do business with bare knuckles, forgoing cutters, lead pipes and pickaxe handles – the fashionable weapons of choice at the time.

At the age of ten, on 26 August 1960, Paul was arrested for the first time for ‘schoolhouse breaking and stealing', and a second charge of intent to steal. He was fined £2 at Liverpool Juvenile Courts. It was the first of 38 convictions Paul would clock up during his criminal career, including 25 for theft, 4 for firearms offences and, incredibly, only 1 for violence.

One month before his 11th birthday, Paul picked up his first probation order, for two years, after burgling an office. At 12 he was sent to a remand home for 28 days for a string of offences including shopbreaking and stealing, house burglary, theft from a motor vehicle and larceny.

Shortly afterwards, Paul was arrested for stealing vanloads of newspapers and organising crews of lads to sell them on street corners. Then he joined a team of teenage jewel thieves and commercial burglars that targeted posh houses, tobacconists and warehouses.

The average score was between £350 and £500 a time and the gang were pulling off three to four jobs a week. It was big money. To show it, Paul dressed in the most expensive Italian suits of the day. He should have been watching The Beatles in the Cavern Club like a normal teenager. But as soon as night fell, his gang would go to work, cutting holes through shop ceilings with his dad's safe-cracking tools, crudely disabling alarms and ‘copping' [grabbing] for the till and the stock if there was time.

Still only 12, Paul was caught, convicted of burglary and sent to approved school for the first time.

At 13, Paul was convicted of burglary once more. He was caught red-handed after falling through the floor of a tobacconist's shop and severing a gas pipe that triggered an alarm. He was sentenced to 12 months at St George's Approved School.

On his release he was convicted of warehouse breaking and sentenced to another year at St Joseph's Approved School in Nantwich, Cheshire. In an unusual act of familial compassion, grandmother Harriet travelled from Liverpool by public transport to visit him. She realised that she had created a monster and to Paul's astonishment urged him to go straight when he got out. This was no big deal. Paul was indifferent to it all. He wasn't passionate about crime; he just did it because that was the way he'd been taught to get through the day. Some kids grew up wanting to be gangsters. Some got a buzz out of it. But to Paul Grimes it was just stuff, it was just business. Mixing with villains young or old, there was an odd detachment about him: impressed by nothing or no one, but cool as ice on the job, and never folding under questioning. That made him ambivalent to Harriet's request, not really caring whether he carried on getting up to no good or went straight.

For the remainder of his sentence Paul just sat back and enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere of the reform home, nurtured by the Christian brothers who were in charge. On his release, Paul was fixed up with a job selling meat from a handcart. Then he landed a job at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. He loved the work and was beginning to enjoy his cosy, hassle-free life as a straight-goer. But it was short lived.

One day two managers inquired whether he was part of the infamous gangster family with the same name. Paul responded by knocking them out with his fists and walking off the job. Paul claims that on the way home, as he walked down a dark entry, he was ambushed by a vanload of policemen. He says he was given a going-over with their truncheons and as he lay bleeding in the central gutter, the standard-issue boots rained down on his face.

It was clearly a set-up, he thought. But fair enough, he figured. He had known there'd be comebacks. It went without saying that hotel managers were well connected with the local police and, after all, he had made a holy show of them – making them lie down and go to sleep under the giant crystal chandelier in the grand ballroom, in front of their stunned staff and distinguished guests. But surprisingly, when he was taken back to the main Bridewell station, Paul was charged with attempting to break into a lock-up. He was being fitted up, but there was no use crying. In January 1967, Paul was sent to a short-sharp-shock detention centre for three months.

PAUL: It was a pure sinker, in all fairness, when I got there. I was looking forward to the brothers again and that. Bit of a relax in the countryside and what have you. Throwing bricks at the cows and that. But borstal was a different thingio altogether. It was all about violence. There was a daddy and all that carry on.