Gangsters' Wives (19 page)

His whole life was a comedy. He was way out of his depth. One time he was waiting for these guys to come to give him money. He was getting more and more anxious because they were late. All of a sudden the door flew open and out of sheer fright he grabbed a gun and the guys were terrified and screamed, ‘We’ll pay you we’ll pay you.’ Obviously Terry looked like this hard guy, but the truth was he was more scared than they were. It was funny. There were loads of mistakes, but he still made loads of money.

He was eventually arrested in Italy. Terry went to prison because this guy he worked with blabbed to save his own skin. He’s the one who brought Terry down. I could wring his neck. And he owes Terry money. We’re still looking for him.

All Terry’s money was taken when he was arrested, all the Swiss bank accounts were frozen. He has no idea exactly how much money he used to have, but let’s just say he used to weigh it rather than count it.

He paid loads of money out in solicitors’ fees to try to get his case heard early, but it was a very corrupt system and someone else was paying for his papers to keep being put to the bottom of the pile the whole time.

I think Terry was pretty broken by his prison experience. Thirteen years is a lifetime in prison. He was in prison in Italy, Spain and then the UK, ending up in Wandsworth. He missed his daughter and his sons terribly, but they were in the US and couldn’t visit.

Prison obviously changed him. Before, he was a Jack the Lad, a very good-looking man, the sort of guy who’d wear a jacket and roll the sleeves up. He’s like the character in
Blow
. In fact his wife rang him up when she’d seen the film and said, ‘How dare you sell our story.’ The only good thing about prison was he really got into art. He ended up teaching it, and doing murals. That’s what kept him sane, I think.

When I met Terry, he’d been out of prison for six months and had lost all his confidence. He was living first with his mum and then in a kind of halfway house that was full of drug addicts. That’s who gave him an E the night we met – otherwise he’d never have had the confidence to venture out.

I was in his flat one day and opened the drawer and there was this big block of something. I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘It’s resin. I’m looking after it for someone.’ I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘Get it out
now
. That’s all you need, for them to come and search this place and find that.’

When Terry told me the truth about his past, three weeks into our relationship, I was really surprised. By that stage I’d worked out it was something criminal, but I had no idea it was that big. To be honest, it didn’t really put me off him. In fact it was quite exciting in a way. But I was frustrated about how stupid he’d been. I don’t mean stupid to do it in the first place, I mean stupid to get caught! As he was telling me, I kept thinking: Why did you do it like that, instead of like this?

After that, it did cross my mind that I should walk away instead of getting more involved, but I really liked him.

I told him that I’d never broken the law in my life, except for stealing off the market stalls and when I was younger and in care. We used to nick little things like balls of mohair wool and hide them under the mattress, then when we had to turn the mattresses over, which we did every few days, I got into trouble. Bed at six o’clock for about a month and no pocket money.

Really, being in care was like being in prison so I suppose Terry and I had that in common. I made the decision to stay with him, and we became inseparable.

I think if Terry hadn’t met me, he would have got back into the drugs thing because it was all he knew. At one point he went off looking at boats in Shoreham. I said, ‘What are you looking at boats for?’ Really, I knew exactly what he was doing that for and so I said, ‘If you go back to what you were doing before, I’m not going to stick around.’

I wasn’t making a moral judgement but I thought he’d been through enough. He hadn’t been that clever the first time, but somehow he’d managed to get away with it for a long time, but I felt his luck had run out. If you’re going to do something like that, you’ve got to be very clever. There are people out there who don’t keep things to themselves. One night we had a big row about it. I stomped off to my own flat – that was the only night I ever spent on my own since we met.

I knew right from the beginning that Terry and I would stay together. I don’t really know why. I’m a bit of a control freak; I like the idea that I keep Terry on the straight and narrow. I feel I’ve won. I was always nosy about what he was doing, making sure he didn’t get up to anything.

I was very protective of Terry in a way. The people he lived with in the flats used to call him The Don, but they were taking the piss out of him. One time they didn’t tell him that a seagull had pooped in his chips and they were just laughing at him. I was furious. I thought: ‘how dare you?

It’s funny, I suppose, me trying to protect this bigtime cocaine smuggler, but that’s the way it has been. Terry has said to me that he thinks he’d probably be back inside if it wasn’t for me.

Mind you, you never completely escape the past, do you? Most of the people he knew before are either inside or dead but a few of the ones in prison have kept in touch with him.

When I was first living with him, some guys came and knocked on the door wanting him to be a witness in a court case in Italy. Terry was still on parole and told them he couldn’t come over. He said he didn’t have a passport, even though he did. He just didn’t want to get a reputation as a snitch.

Since we’ve been together he has been rebuilding his relationship with his children back in America. His daughter came over to see him with her husband and he hadn’t seen her since she was ten. It was very emotional.

He’s got two sons. One is posted over in Iraq. The other is doing really well building houses in Massachusetts. Has his own construction company. He says, ‘I always remember what you said to me, Dad: you told me you’ll never make any money working for someone else.’ That’s one good thing Terry did.

The life Terry lived before prison was completely outside of my experience, but that doesn’t really scare me. I’m not a softie by any means. You’ve got to cover yourself in this world, nobody else is going to look after you. If I had felt Terry was somehow a threat to me or my way of life, I’d be up and gone. I know Terry used to dabble in drugs, but he was never an addict. He says he used to look at people taking it and think: You’re talking crap. Two days could go just taking line after line and talking rubbish.

We live in a little house in Worthing now with Terry’s mum. Sometimes when I think about his past, and the money he used to have, I do have those feelings of ‘I wish I’d known him then’. It’s the worst thing in the world knowing there’s all that money sitting frozen in Swiss bank accounts and not being able to get it. And of course, if I’d known him then, I’d have made sure he never got caught!

But, to be honest, I don’t think we’d have got on in those days. He was a shopaholic. Everything was designer this and that. He was so abuzz with it, he wasn’t such a good person. So it’s probably quite good we didn’t meet then. Mind you, I think I would have been all right on the run. I’ve always run away. My whole life has been running away.

I don’t want to do any more running. I’ve found what I was looking for at long last.

After nearly three decades of conventional, but unfulfilling marriage in the Midlands, Becky Loy was desperate for adventure. Sometimes, as they say, you should be careful what you wish for. Newly divorced, she moved to southern Spain and almost immediately hooked up with Alex, a Romanian gangster, twenty-two years her junior. Alex had been in and out of prison as a youngster, mostly for car theft, and had graduated to drug deals on the Costa del Sol
.

Always volatile and macho, Alex’s behaviour grew increasingly erratic as he became dependent on steroids. The relationship cracked just as quickly as Becky’s finances crumbled, with Alex eventually going back to live in Romania where he has been for the last two years
.

Now fifty-nine, Becky faces getting older without either financial or emotional support. A tough, un-self-pitying woman, her heavily mascaraed eyes nevertheless brim over when describing how she’s had to scrabble around
to survive over the last years, even resorting to being a high-class dominatrix to try to make a living. However, she prides herself on being a survivor and, despite everything, remains fondly indulgent towards her errant Romanian husband
.

When we meet, she is trapped in a nightmare domestic set-up, the fledgling property consultancy she is trying to set up has just been evicted from its offices and she is down to her last twenty-five euros, but she insists she is optimistic about the future. I leave her sitting at a plastic café table on a busy thoroughfare in Fuengirola, making calls on her mobile phone, trying to sort out yet another deal to get her out of her current crisis – still determined to see it as the next step in her great adventure
.

I thought it was a bit strange when my new husband Alex asked me to stop the car suddenly. We’d been out for a long drive and were on our way home when he directed me through a neighbourhood I’d never been in before.

‘Stay here,’ he told me. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

He was always disappearing and I’d learned not to ask too many questions. ‘Everything OK?’ I asked when he got back.

‘Fine,’ he said, not meeting my eyes and fidgeting with something by his feet.

As we arrived back at our apartment, he slid a carrier bag out from under the seat.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, suspiciously.

‘Nothing,’ he replied, but I could see from his face that it was far from nothing.

‘Show me,’ I insisted.

Inside the bag was a gun and what looked like big bars of chocolate.

I shrieked at him to get rid of the gun. ‘What are you doing bringing that into my car?’ I yelled. ‘And why have you got bars of chocolate?’

That’s how naive I was. I didn’t even know those were bars of hashish. I’m telling you, when you marry a gangster, you learn fast.

But then nothing about my early years had prepared me for meeting someone like Alex.

I came from the Midlands. I married young to a fabulous guy and we had a son together, but I always had a business head on me. At first I had a nursing home in Birmingham, then when I sold that, we moved out towards Stratford-upon-Avon and I worked in a hotel near the theatre. I liked that because I met a lot of nice people. Then I ended up going to work for the Hilton group of hotels.

My husband and I enjoyed a good standard of living, but it wasn’t an exciting life. He was a good man, but he was boring. We’d stopped having sex quite early on. For sixteen years I didn’t so much as kiss a guy. I used to think to myself: Surely I was destined for more than that? As it turned out, I was right – though not quite in the way I envisaged.

The first change came when I started an affair with a guy I’d known for five years. I didn’t set out for it to happen but once it did, it was as though I’d been woken up to life. When that guy moved to Australia I really missed that feeling of being alive. I missed the sex.

A friend of mine said, ‘You’ve not been happy for years. Why don’t you get yourself an escort?’

It may sound extreme, but I was at a really restless stage. I’d had skin cancer, undergone a hysterectomy and my mum died at the age of fifty-six, so there was a bit of me going ‘hang on, I only get one shot at all of this’.

So I contacted an escort agency. Chris and I hit it off straight away. That first ‘date’ led to a second and then a third, and then we were seeing each other regularly. It was easy to hide it from my husband. We’d always had separate bank accounts and we didn’t keep an eye on each other’s money. The absences weren’t hard to explain: I was on a nursing course, or I was out with the girls.

When my escort asked if I’d ever skied (he was foreign and was practically born on skis) I said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ We went skiing, we went on holidays together. It went on for three years and cost me a fortune. I think I spent over £60,000 on Chris over the years, although I didn’t pay every single time we were together. In all that time my husband never clicked. I certainly didn’t want to hurt him.

Inevitably, being with Chris made me increasingly dissatisfied with my marriage. One day my husband and I were arguing and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you get a divorce if you’re not happy?’ and I said, ‘OK, I will.’ And that was that. We were together twenty-seven years and I couldn’t fault the guy, but he was just the wrong husband for me.

The problem was that I fell in love with Chris. That may sound naive considering I was paying him to be with me, but it actually turned into a good relationship in many ways. When I was ill he was there for me. It wasn’t all one-sided. Still, I knew it wasn’t going anywhere and began looking at ways to make a clean break and start again.

After the divorce I was quite well off. I went out to southern Spain, which I’d fallen in love with some time before, and put a deposit on an investment property. Back in England, I started talking to a group of girlfriends. We were all a bit disenchanted with life, and I said, ‘I’ve got a property in Spain, I’ve got a bit of money. Let’s open a bar.’

So I flew back to Spain to do a bit of research, then went back again, and that was it really. It was very quick – everything was sorted within a month.

Coming over to Spain was part running away and part wanting to start a new life. I had no intentions of another fella – not immediately anyway. Everything just seemed right for a move. My escort had taught me that there was more to life than just trundling along in a boring rut, waiting to draw my pension. I felt it was a case of now or never.

Chris helped me with the move. We drove over together in October 1999 with a car full of stuff and found an apartment in a coastal resort called Duquesa. Then as my two girlfriends flew in, he flew out, literally crossing at the airport.

And that was it. We went round a few agents, looking at clubs, found what we wanted and put a deposit down. By that time it was Christmas.