I was upstairs for the longest 40 minutes of my life. As they helped themselves to beer and frightened all my customers away, I dialled 999 four times and explained what was going on. I was shitting myself when I made the last 999 call, as one of the animals downstairs picked up the bar extension, and I heard him shout that the police could come if they fucking dared. ‘I am out of here,’ I thought.
My spineless boyfriend didn’t do much to defend my honour – nor did our relationship last long after that – so the fire escape seemed the best option. I thought I could go out the back and get in my car – but the police had impounded it. I was surely dead. As I was about to leave, I realised I might never return, so I thought I had better bring the weekend’s takings with me. They were duly stuffed down the front of my leather jeans.
I got out just as the mob were breaking into the flat, and for the first and last time in my life I ran about two miles (I couldn’t normally manage two hundred yards) down the canal towards Golcar. The thugs, who had picked up cricket bats and stumps that my tit of a boyfriend had left in the hall, were nearly catching me up. In the pitch black, I climbed over a canal lock and started banging doors in an adjacent street. As soon as someone answered their door, I dived inside. I then phoned the police again, but they didn’t come. Eventually, the owner gave me a lift to a hotel on the M62, a few miles away.
Daylight broke and decisions had to be made. I called the police again and told them where I was. Later that morning, there was a knock on the door of my room. It was two guys from CID. Hooray, the police. I was livid and started ranting and raving about what time did they call this and where were they a few hours earlier. They said that they knew nothing about the night before. They also explained that mentioning the names of the thugs might have stopped the police from coming into the village at night! Fucking marvellous. I was then arrested for committing GBH on the arsehole who had beaten up the barmaid.
I was interviewed in one of those rooms that you see on
The Bill
and bailed to return to The Slaughtered Lamb. ‘I’d rather be in the nick,’ I thought. The police explained that my car had been returned to the pub. ‘Fan-bloody-tastic,’ I thought, as I wasn’t going back there. But I did.
That’s when the scary ‘gangster’ thing happened. I was met on the street by the barmaid who had saved my life. She gave me the keys to the pub and said the eldest brother wanted to see me. I met him in a café, and he apologised, saying that they had got it wrong. Whitney had told them the truth. However, she hadn’t passed that information onto the police for fear of being charged, and her boyfriend was still in a coma. The brother also said that he wanted me to come back and run the pub. ‘No fucking way,’ I thought.
I believe he never fully recovered, and the two lads got five years, but they did not implicate me or my dickhead boyfriend who had handed them the stick. I refused to give evidence against them and thought that the whole thing would be thrown out of the magistrates’ court. But it wasn’t, and my bottle truly went when the case was heard in the Crown court some 11 months later. Although there was no real evidence against me, Mandy came with me so that she could drive my car home – just in case. The two lads had been inside on remand since being arrested. They looked shocking, and one of them had deliberately dropped three or four stone so he wouldn’t look ‘hard’. I copped a plea of perverting the course of justice and was given a 12-month suspended sentence. I was out of there in a shot and never looked back. I sold the tenancy of the pub to the gay barber in the village and headed home.
Not long after, I was asked to infiltrate a restaurant called Fat Pigs in Eccles, a not-so-lovely suburb of Manchester, for the owners of Hurley’s Sports, who had been forced to shut down their sports shop, as they couldn’t insure it because of ram raiders. Nice place, Eccles. At least this time I knew what breed of nutter I might have to deal with, and I also had door staff to back me up.
Fat Pigs had had its heyday as a restaurant and party venue, and had since gone rapidly downhill. The staff were thieving and lazy bastards, and I was asked to sort it out. Yates’s Wine Lodge was at its height in nearby Swinton – where I was later to have my last pub – and I wanted to rename Fat Pigs ‘The Swine Lodge’, but Mark, the owner, thought better of it.
I got the place a full licence and turned slow Sundays into a busy disco night. We had a good winter. I got the place back on its feet and was taking up to £10,000 a week by Christmas. However, there were quite a few incidents at Fat Pigs, including kidnappings and ransom notes! Mark’s pig statues, which were dotted all over the restaurant, ended up all over Salford, and we once got a postcard with a ransom demand from Australia. I would get calls every Monday morning to collect one of our pigs from a venue up and down the precinct.
It was a busy venue, and we ended up with a good strong door team. There were a number of venues within yards of each other, and we all helped each other out when it kicked off. I loved it and would have stayed a lot longer, but I wasn’t paid what I was promised and moved on.
The Brook in Swinton was another fine example of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I had many happy times there, as well as numerous rucks, whilst trying to tame the locals and gain their respect. My first weekend started with an encounter with what can only be described as two of the biggest, ugliest, thickest fuckers I have ever had the misfortune to come across. They approached me in the pub and told me that they were going to do the door for me. ‘That’s nice,’ I said, ‘but we are a local pub, and I don’t have any vacancies for door staff.’
‘No, you don’t understand, missus. We are doing yer fucking door, and yer gonna pay us 50 quid a night each.’ Again, I politely refused. ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know who my fucking uncle is?’
It’s amazing how many nephews the top dogs in Salford have. Anyhow, he went on to explain who his uncle was and what he would do to me. Thinking on my feet, I replied, ‘Well, do you know who I am? Do you know who my fucking uncle is?’ (Of course, they didn’t, as Glasgow is a long way from Salford.) ‘Go tell your scumbag fucking uncle who my uncle is, and if you still want to do my door, come back and we’ll talk.’ It was the silliest thing I have ever said. I could hear people laughing in the background, but these two idiots were so confused that they just walked away scratching their heads, and I never saw them again – I guess they didn’t want to meet my uncle. I had learned another important lesson: confusion is a great tool when negotiating your way out of a jam.
I formed the Leadership Development Centre back in 2003 after 20 or so years in the licensed and event-and-exhibition-management trades, having decided to eventually sell up and leave my pub and restaurant businesses. I attended college and university to gain the necessary qualifications to teach in adult education. The catalyst had been a British Institute of Innkeeping Awarding Body (BIIAB) course in financial management I attended with an excellent trainer called Sara Bryan. There were ten to twelve people on the course, which lasted three days. I paid £350 to attend, I think, and the most important financial lesson I learned was that Sara and her company had earned approximately £3,500 for three days’ work, whereas I was still working ninety or so hours a week in a friggin’ pub for a fraction of that. There and then I decided training was the business to be in.
It took a couple of years, but I graduated from university and achieved centre approval from BIIAB to run licensing qualifications. The government was discussing their plans to implement the 2003 Liquor Licensing Act at that time, but the Private Security Act was in full swing, and the SIA had just made their first fuck-up. Everyone had to be conflict-management trained prior to licensing, and guess what? There weren’t enough conflict-management trainers. In fact, there were hardly any.
I was invited to do trainer training by a company called Maybo in Birmingham, where I met one of my first door bosses, a bloke by the name of Will Davies, who I later found out ran doors from Manchester and the North East down to Swansea in Wales. Will is a gentleman of the highest order, and I learned more from him that week and on a subsequent physical-intervention course than the so-called instructors had taught me.
On my return to Manchester with my new-found status of conflict-management trainer, I discovered that there was only one other person with the same qualification in all of the north-west of England. Mike worked at Wigan College at that time, and we later became good friends.
One day, I got a call from somebody called Damian, who was running the offices of North Cheshire Security, owned by Mickey Francis. I visited them, met Mickey and a deal was done: I was booked to run my first door course. Once there, I met Lesley Aimes – I was so glad there was a lady on that first course. I don’t think she will ever know how much she lifted my confidence, but I was terrified. It was one of those arse-twitching moments; similar, I suppose, to the way you feel on your first night working the doors. Lesley was in charge of that group, some of whom you could only describe as ‘big hard bastards’, and I learned my first lesson: complete respect is paramount in the security world.
And so it had started. It was now March 2004, and the SIA had stipulated that the lads working the doors in Manchester had to be licensed by 14 November that year, by which time I had trained 2,200 bouncers – now known by the more politically correct title of door supervisors. My life has been a bit of a roller coaster ever since.
Just before the licensing deadline, I had a funny experience when I was asked by the owner of Jilly’s Music Box on Oxford Road in Manchester to attend a ‘pub watch’ meeting that had been called by Greater Manchester Police to discuss how they were going to deal with licensing – or the lack of it at that point – over Christmas. Everyone introduced themselves, as I did when my turn came round. But before the meeting started, I was asked to leave, because ‘I represented too many door companies, and my presence was a conflict of interests’. ‘Whose?’ I thought. There was a bit of an uproar (in my defence), but I left. I didn’t want to piss the police off. Later that afternoon, I got a report of what had been too sensitive for me to hear. (Did they really think I wouldn’t find out?) Provided that door supervisors had completed their training and could evidence it, they would be allowed to work over Christmas – and this was the bit I wasn’t supposed to hear – as long as the police didn’t have a problem with the individual, and anyone in the city they wanted off the doors would be gone by the New Year.
As my business had grown really quickly and I had gone to university and achieved a level-four teaching qualification, I could train trainers to level three, the required standard to deliver SIA courses. I got approval to do so from Edexcel – an awarding body – and started to train trainers.
Licences for wheel clampers (most of the industry couldn’t spell ‘vehicle immobiliser’) was the SIA’s next fuck-up and my next big triumph. It was virtually impossible to find a wheel clamper anywhere in the UK who had the appropriate teaching qualification in order to be approved and accredited by the SIA to teach the required syllabus for that sector of the industry. You tell me: where are you going to find a wheel clamper who has a teaching qualification? Who the fuck thought that one up? So, I did my research and soon attended my first wheel-clamping lesson, which caused a storm at Salford University, where we were based. Everyone started panicking and coming out of their offices, thinking that they were being clamped by me in the main university car park. They were reassured when reception told them, ‘It’s just Mol with some of her bouncer geezers.’
And how good for business it was when
The Sun
newspaper (I think) ran the headline ‘Pay £500, Go to College for Four Days and Become a Complete Bastard’. Because none of the colleges wanted to run the course, we were the first to get accredited in the north, and we were off and running in our second niche market. God bless the clampers – they always turn up with cash.
I remember when I delivered my first course as a newly qualified clamping expert, I said to the guys, ‘Right, lads, this is where I have to show you how to put a clamp on.’ They all fell off their chairs laughing at me. (That was the intention, as I was much more confident by then.) I then suggested we go outside and practise the dirty deed, and I could video them to build up my training material. Those boys had the clamps out of the van and on the cars quicker than I could get the camera out of my pocket. ‘You don’t want to fuck about on your back putting a clamp on someone’s car,’ one of them explained, ‘You don’t know who’s coming back.’
I then formed a close protection company in late 2005, early 2006, employing two operations managers. Danny, who still works with me to this day, was really old school and commanded lots of respect and loyalty. The other sadly reinvented himself as 007, proved himself to have neither respect nor loyalty, stole from the business and lied so much about his background that I don’t think even he knew who he was. He is a fuck-up who will get his just rewards and has already disrespected others with far less patience than me.
The motivation for starting a close protection company was twofold: first, outside of the SIA itself, I probably had one of the biggest databases of door supervisors in the country, and a large number of these door supervisors also wanted to enter the world of close protection. For many in the industry, moving from door work into close protection seemed like a natural career progression. Second, as we started to run level three close protection courses, our client base for this type of training changed from big security companies with hundreds of staff to individuals and door supervisors looking for both accredited training
and
work after completing the course. I therefore felt I could not only bid for our own contracts but network with other established companies on the circuit to help our guys into employment. This was the ultimate goal of starting a close protection company: the ability not only to offer close protection training approved and accredited by the SIA but also to offer our best students close protection work after qualifying and becoming licensed.