Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Graham Johnson is the author of the bestselling Powder Wars, Football and Gangsters and Druglord. He is a former investigations editor at the Sunday Mirror and during ten years on Fleet Street covered subjects including child slavery, people smuggling, drugs and the Balkan wars.

Customer Reviews

Facinating and Easy To Read Book
Graham Johnson writes this book from the perpective of the man who the book is based on - Stephen French. Having met with Stephen and done hundreds of hours of interviews, the book totaly feels like its being written from the man himself. The author writes the story from Stephens perspective to give a closer feel for the reader. The book reveals many incidents of the life some peopler called "The Devil". The book has so many stories to tell of extrmely dangerous conflict situations between rival gangs, feuds with fellow crew members and the author does not hold back. The author says in the first few pages how he really wanted to get the reader a feeling of Stephens perspective. I really felt I got a very strong sense of the man from this book and read it in 2 days. This guy had many wild encounters for decades. Many people would surely be dead or incarcerated if they were in the same situations. Find out how he survived and how Stephen was able to make changes to his life by turning his back on crime. A facinating read and well written book. Recommend highly especily if you would like to read about real life dangerous encounters or crime. Things thankfully can change

Great!
Excellent book!

Unlike another book i recently read on a similar subject this is a well written book with some great stories of life amongst gangland britain.

Same old self serving story
Read quite a lot of these style of books and they all seem to have pretty much the same lines,ie us real gangsters,us real hard men and its more like an ego trip thing however this guy is slightly different in that hes actually educated but still lets himself down by making himself out to be the toughest man on the planet and as we all know most of these types only tell the story when they are winners never losers,however history usually tells the true story even great toughs like the late Lenny McLean & Roy Shaw were beaten by fairly average people so on that score the story i felt was more of the same,as for racism certainly never saw any of that maybe there were more white dealers than colours , but all in all if you like the hood element this book is quite interesting