Current mood: NAUGHTY..
Category: NAUGHTY.. Jobs, Work, Careers
(This is of course fictional, it couldn’t have possibly happenned, I’m a good boy - oh and some of the names have been changed to perhaps save my fictional ass)
This stint, I’ve been living in London for almost 6 years, and though I’ve done my very best to avoid all regular work throughout, I found myself enslaved in a nine to five for a full 6 months (to the day) one year in…
I say a nine to five - but it was in fact a 2pm till 12 midnight shift.
It was a nasty ball breaker of a job and I was (as always) glad to be shot of it as soon as I could find a decent way out.
But whereas I consider getting out of most jobs to be an essential act of self preservation, on this occasion this need was a touch more immediate...
The Job...
This job was as a Registered Mail Clerk for a company called Peedmail National.
Peedmail National was one of the few companies given a licence to deal with door to door mail deliveries in the UK in competition to the once monopolistic Post Office.
Located in The Bermondsey Triangle, an area of London marked by it’s huge housing estates and the highest percentage of organized criminals in The UK, Peedmail Int was a viciously ruthless business, that prided itself on meanness to staff (it had prison style stainless steel toilets with no seats, no maternity leave, low wages, no sick pay etc) and VERY high profitability..
Yes boss, I was soon to find out that Peedmail was essentially run by barely legal gangsters, as were most of the courier companies in The Bermondsey Triangle...
The Case of George Francis
A few weeks before I arrived at Peedmail, career criminal, courier operator and well known local face George Francis had been executed about 50 yards away from the Peedmail front gate...
’When 63-year-old George Francis was gunned down in a south London street in the early hours of Wednesday morning, it sent a wave of panic and terror throughout the underworld.
At first, it seemed the death of the former associate of the Kray twins, whose name has been linked to at least 20 murders, was just part of London’s increasingly violent gang wars. An Observer investigation can reveal, however, that Francis is the latest victim of what has been dubbed the curse of the Brink’s-Mat millions.
Francis’s murder is the ninth in a 20-year saga of betrayal, double-dealing and death in the hunt for the proceeds of Britain’s biggest-ever robbery, when a gang raided a Brink’s-Mat warehouse at Heathrow and got away with £26 million in gold ingots. At least £10m is still unaccounted for and few believe this killing will be the last.’
The slaying of Francis was a clinical job, that had only just been missed by my immediate Peedmail boss Mike. Finishing as he did at 3am, Mike had walked past the scene of the crime on his way home only minutes before Francis was shot 4 times.
Mike often recounted the story of that night in spare moments, along with the names of the criminals who had sent flowers to the spot of death as well as various other myths and legends of South London’s moblife. And during my lunchbreak, I’d often wander past Francis old gaff, feel annoyed I’d missed the event and stop to consider how it must have transpired.
In such a job, you have to make your own entertainment..
Anyway, the boss of Peedmail, a rather rotund and nasty looking man named Ray, might well have been a gangster of some shade, but he wasn’t quite in the old school mould of Francis.
Ray did however clearly fancy himself as Tony Soprano, and for this reason I quite liked him …
As with Soprano, Ray had a very clear command and control structure in place. He was very rarely seen around the warehouse, but rumour had it that when he blew one off at you, HE FUCKING BLEW ONE OFF!! And I knew this to be the case because he’d blown one BIG FUCKER OFF!!! just prior to my getting the job.
One of the big contracts that Peedmail had was with National Magazines.
Owners of titles like Cosmopolitan and Company, National Mags used Peedmails vans to transport all the posh frocks and designer gear reviewed and modeled from the PR offices and designers to the mags HQ where they’d be worn by the models and then snapped.
Well, all these clothes had to be checked in and out of the warehouse by us Registered Mail Clerks and prior to my arrival, a lot of it had been going missing..
Yes boss, because Peedmail was a very cheap and mean company, the registered mail system was anitquarian and ’mistakes’ were regularly and lovingly made...
The Sting....
Well, realising that something was afoot, the management and police pulled some kind of a sting to find the culprits in this racket, resulting in a whole bunch of staff being rounded up and carted off to the nick including 4 members of one family.
All were still awaiting their fates when I left and I never did find out what happenned to them, though I did go drinking with them a few times in the weeks before leaving and from what they knew the case seemed to be dying a death...
Mike...
So, I took one of these naughty guys jobs, and worked alongside Mike.
Mike had survived the cull, but given that the family of 4 who’d been pulled, were his best mates and he was the other Reg Clerk, it was difficult to believe he’d known nothing of it.
In fact, I was always sure he knew everything about it and I think the management knew that as well as anyone else did, however they couldn’t sack the whole registered mail staff and expect the business to run well - in the short term at least...
Warners...
Anyway, I wasn’t too interested in knocking off high fashion, but one part of my job in the afternoons, was to mail out all CD and vinyl releases for Warners and this aspect interested me immensely...
Yes boss, Peedmail had the contract and the promo list for one of the worlds biggest labels – which was handy for someone who’d been trying and failing to make some kind of an inroad into the music business.
And of an afternoon, I spent many an hour trying to memorise the names and addresses of the big players as I stuck the stickers on the envelopes: The DJs, the contacts at the stations, the big fish with whom I would need to become acquainted, if I was to do anything serious in music..
Guantanamo...
It would be no exageration to say that the layout of the Peedmail warehouse was like Guantanamo Bay:
Open plan, the whole warehouse and the registered mail section in particular was divided up into a series of open wire metal cages covered by loads of cameras..
For this reason, crime at work wasn’t easy, but as so often happens with poorly paid work, you can only look a certain level of temptation in the face, before you get tempted to try your luck - and at Peedmail it was almost a part of the job and culture to have a go if you thought you were hard enough…
I therefore waited and waited and 5 months in, 2 very good options came along…
The first was a promo release set of REMs Greatest Hits.
This special edition was limited to a few hundred and each track was on an individual disc inside a large cigarette packet like boxset. With so few of these about, and with REM being very collectable, I figured they’d be worth a shot..
The second item I got friendly with, was a 250 only pressing of a Madonna White Label featuring a couple of very scarce dance remixes.
I forget the song now, and though I perhaps still have 4 of them, I can’t be arsed to look them out now. Suffice to say these are SUPER RARE and basically went to the cream of commercial dance DJays – the likes of Pete Tong, Roger Sanchez, Judge Jules etc…
How I did it...
(I’ll include more details of this in an extended version of this piece that’ll appear in the pay for Vest of Paul Giovanni due out sometime next year (Double Theft – BRILLIANT!!!))
Advice
I will however finish this first draft piece by offering some general advice that might well be worth considering when stealing from your employer...
Basically: Work hard, turn up on time, say YES BOSS!!! alot, keep your head down and you’ll be surprised at what you can get away with...
But if you think you can keep it up and not get caught, you’re a fool...
Always know when to quit...
Which, after getting my stash of collectable records, is exactly what i did....
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