Peering out through the taxi window into the dimply lit back streets, I was appalled at the sheer number of young girls that were prostituting themselves all for drugs. Is this modern England in the twenty first century? It really does not matter where in the world you are, city centre backstreets seem all alike. Dimly lit places full of whores, junkies, robbers and roaming gangs.
I was on my way to Merrill’s snooker club which was one of these twenty four hour joints on the outskirts. It was far from being plush and wasn’t exactly the type of place where you would take your son for a few frames. It was run by an Irishman called Dale Regan who had bought the place a couple of years earlier apparently in some dodgy deal or so rumour has it.
I had just spent a rather poor evening out with a couple of friends at Silks which was one of the more up market nightclubs. But after almost getting into a fight with a couple of blokes over an incident at the bar involving a spilt drink and my best mate going on tilt after a girl that he had been chasing all night had given him the finger, I was ready to call it a night and did so at about 1.30am.
What is it with my so called mates? We always start off having a good laugh and then either get totally separated during the night or there is trouble of some sort, sometimes I don’t know why I bother. But I just did not fancy going home and Dale Regan’s place seemed like the perfect place to be for a guy who was at a loss for somewhere to go at 1.30am in the morning.
The rules at Merrill’s if you could call them that were slack to say the least. They were Dale’s rules and that was it. This broadly meant that anything whatsoever could go off as long as Dale knew about it and you kept him sweet by bunging him a few quid every now and then. He served alcohol all round the clock but only to the people who he knew.
Merrill’s between the hours of midnight and lunchtime was a sight to be seen. It was a sheer A to Z of walking low life but yet despite this, nobody caused any trouble. They all knew Dale and they all knew not only how tough he was but also how connected he was with the mob. In fact Dale kind of had his own mob as the Regan brothers had come across from Ireland with somewhat of a reputation.
His three other brothers, Robbie, Connor and John were all running some kind of racket but it was Dale who was left to run the Snooker club. But if any one of them was ever in trouble or needed something or someone sorting out then the others would come running. Three of them had done stretches inside at some stage including the youngest, Connor for possession and dealing drugs.
Merrill’s needed a lot of work doing to it. The décor was twenty years out of date and the six Snooker tables all needed repair and cleaning work doing to them. A couple of frames on them and your hands were covered with dirt and slime from the baize.
I arrived at around 1.50am has I had managed to get myself a taxi straight away by leaving Silks early and avoiding the rush. The bottom door to the stairway was always open but the main door into the Snooker hall was always locked. There was CCTV over the door and a small hatch so that Dale could check who was requesting access to his club although this was more to prevent quick access by the law of that I was certain.
I had been a very keen Snooker player in my youth but I hated playing on the tables at Merrill’s and I had certainly not gone there for the pleasant hospitality. The reason that I was there was because this was a Thursday night and this meant that the local casino just a couple of miles down the road had been staging a small poker tournament.
Small by national standards but large enough to attract players from around a forty mile radius and there were always a couple of decent sized cash games going off as well. But the casino closed its doors at 4.00am when many of the players who had busted out of the tournament late on had only just got started with their cash games. The players still wanted to play poker and all they needed was a venue….enter Dale Regan.
Dale provided a couple of circular felted tables for poker in a small room off to the side. A horrible room with no air conditioning and made even worse when you had a dozen people smoking in it, sometimes it was difficult to breath. But it was worth it as these cash games were one hundred pound games. This meant that you could not take a seat with anything less than £100. Most players sat down with around five times that and the quality of play was non too hot either.
“In early tonight Carl lad” remarked Dale. I could normally understand Dale’s accent but when he got excited or talked quickly then it wasn’t always possible to follow everything that he said.
“Come for the game?” he went on.
“Yeah, I think a few of the crew will be here later. You couldn’t fix me up a couple of sandwiches could you Dale, I am absolutely starving” I replied.
I knew that the players from the casino would start to arrive from about 3.30am onwards for the usual dealers choice pot limit games. I only had about forty pound on me when I had left Silks
but a brief stop off at a cash machine had provided me with an extra £250. I would still be playing with less money than most players and it could all be gone in one big pot but that’s poker for you.
I knew that it would be a while before the players started to arrive and the entertainment was a little thin on the ground at Dale’s place. The only other form of entertainment was the old black and white movie that Dale was watching on and off in the bar area while fixing me my sandwiches.
Although having said that, if you were that way inclined there were other more sordid forms of entertainment at Merrill’s. Dale rented out a couple of rooms around the back to local prostitutes who would bring punters back on an almost hourly basis. From where I was sat I could hear their stilettos on the steel external staircase round the back and when everything was quite and lets face it, in a Snooker club then it usually is…you could actually hear them going about their business.
Dale was hardly a culinary wizard and he served up a plate of sandwiches that a dog would have probably turned its nose up at. Funny thing was that he had attempted to make the serving look stylish and more edible by placing a couple of crisps and a lettuce leaf at the side. The bread tasted like it was a week out of date and at any other time, I would have refused to eat it but hunger and not wanting to play poker on an empty stomach made me persevere with the ordeal.
“Are they all right for you Carl lad?” inquired Dale.
“Yeah…..cheers Dale……just what the Doctor ordered” I shouted back.
Although eating anything at Dale’s club and a doctor might just be what you would soon be ordering. By about 2.30am, I was getting rather bored and was contemplating getting my hands filthy on the Snooker tables. Just then I felt a presence by my side and looked around to see a diminutive little Thai girl of around five foot smiling at me.
I knew her from my time at the casino where I used to work. She was one of the local Thai hookers who worked in the nearby sauna.
“You wanna have fun wid me darling…..I give you good time”
Her name was Mandy Li or at least that’s what she told people, business sure must be slack tonight for her to be in here I thought.
I politely refused (yes I did refuse actually) although she persevered for a while before finally getting the message, she gave a slight shrug and walked off. Thankfully I didn’t have long to wait before the players arrived. They were early, it was only about 3.00am and the casino didn’t close its doors for another hour.
A small group of five arrived, four of which I had played with before but the other one was unknown to me. Terry Shepherd was a local bookie. He was a large man of about eighteen stone with a large character to boot. No one liked him, he was rude, loud and had some very bad habits and a personal hygiene problem on top of that.
He once got totally laid out by a punter after pestering and then groping this guy’s girlfriend. Unfortunately for him, the guy saw him and Terry spent two days in hospital. At least this game was not going to be dull although if I knew Terry, he might just be spending more time with Mandy Li than he would be doing with us.
Terry had provided the transport for several other players, one of which was an Asian guy who I only knew by the name of Yilmaz. He was a taxi driver but the amount of cash that he had to splash on the roulette tables indicated that taxi driving was not his only source of income although what the other source is was anyone’s guess.
Then there was Steve Yates who owned his own double glazing firm. He had spent six months at one of his majesty’s leisure and relaxation complexes for fraud and he had not been out too long. The other guy was an Iranian called Ramdi. I wasn’t sure but I think that he owned several massage parlours across the other side of town. He had once approached me while I was still in gaming to collude to which I had declined. He must have had me pegged as some shady geezer because he approached me again some time later to try and get me involved in some insurance scam of which the details are really not known to me as I was not interested and told him so in no uncertain terms.
“Do we have enough for a game before the rest get here” enquired Steve.
“Of course we do, what’s the matter…..are you shitting yourself about playing short handed or something” shouted Terry. The guy just found it impossible to speak normally without shouting. From what I heard, he wasn’t even a skilled bookie and was as bent as anything by all accounts. His betting office had been robbed several times during an eighteen month period and rumour had it that it had been Terry who had been behind it.
“We have five or six I think” said Yilmaz
“Right….what are we waiting for then…..HEY DALE…..TURN THE LIGHTS ON IN THE CARDROOM WOULD YER” bellowed Terry once again.
Within several minutes the six of us were seated around the largest of the two tables and Yilmaz was spreading the cards on the table after breaking the seal. As if the deck having a seal was evidence that this game was straight!
With games like these, you really took a seat and then took your chances. I knew these guys but I certainly could not vouch for their integrity. In fact, the only thing that I could vouch for was that every single one of them was a classified scumbag. The only saving grace was that if this game was bent then the most they could take me for was £250 as there was no chance that I was walking half a mile to the nearest ATM.
Of course I knew many people here who could provide me with further finances but there was no way that I was going down that road. Because I knew many of the players, I felt reasonably reassured that the games were straight although I was always wary of new faces.
Luckily for me I had hit a couple of nice pots early on and my original £250 had now swelled to nearly £400. Steve had taken a big hit in a hand of seven stud to Terry and by god did Terry let him know as he loudly claimed that it was “men against boys”.
Although in my mind it was Terry that was providing most of the value in this game based on what I had seen in the past. I always picked hold’em when the button was on me for several reasons. Firstly because it was my best game and secondly because picking the same game can often make other players think that this is the only game that you feel comfortable in.
We played an assortment of games in the usual cash game at Dale’s club but most of the time it was a combination of Omaha, Stud, Hold’em and Irish with some lowball every now and again. Whenever anyone called for a variation that no one knew, it was usually met with howls of derision as no one could be bothered to wait and listen to how the game was played…..it was usually Terry doing the howling.
Speaking of howling, the girls upstairs were obviously getting down to business and Mandy Li wandered into our little game and was trying to convince Terry that he would be better off upstairs than playing in our silly game of cards much to his embarrassment, I kind of got the feeling that the two of them did quite a bit of business.
Despite the fact that Omaha is far from being my strongest game, I seemed to be picking up pots quite frequently. Terry was making the game pretty wild with his constant straddling and raising but this was how he played. He had money to burn and liked putting players under pressure and watching them squirm, it was his reason for a playing the game.
The blinds were £2-£2 in our pot limit game and the usual amount of money on the table was in the region of about five to ten grand although most of the players were carrying more than what they had on the table…..I was the table pauper.
I managed to get myself into a couple of situations against Terry where he raised me out of the pot. I just knew that he didn’t have anything but didn’t have the nerve or the money to call him both times. I think that he knew that I was playing with all I had and used that against me which I have to give him credit for.
There was a hand where I open raised on the button with an A-9 and Terry called from the big blind. The flop came J-9-8 and the jack and the eight were of the same suit. Terry checked and I bet about two thirds of the pot and he check raised me. I just could not afford to get involved with what I had on the table even though I knew his game reasonably well and felt sure that he was on a draw.
He liked to play his draws really fast and I had seen him check raise on a drawing hand more times than I can care to remember. This begs the question why did I bet the flop after he had checked to me? But Terry either outplayed me or out muscled me on a couple of occasions and I felt like I passed the best hand both times.
Ramdi was playing his usual sit and wait style and letting everyone else get on with it. There was another Asian guy whose name I was yet to hear and who I had never seen before on the table and I was keeping a very close eye on him I can tell you. I did not trust Ramdi and especially after the insurance scam episode although would you really trust a guy who owned massage parlours anyway?
I felt that Terry had really got my number and sensed that I was playing on short money. I think that today would have to be an exception in so much as I would have to avoid Terry unless I had a big hand.
We had been playing for around an hour when the rest of the players started to arrive in ones and twos. You could hear the bad beat stories from the other side of the club. There was a heated argument going off between two English players, one of which was a guy called Gary Rogers who owned a string of solariums in the area.
From what I could gather, there had been some dispute on the final table of the tournament and by the sounds of it, the decision of the cardroom supervisor had not gone down too well. Gary was also claiming that several of the players on that table had been softplaying and it was rare to hear Gary swear but the language was certainly colourful.
All until the very powerful voice of Dale Regan intervened that is. Even then, Gary not to be intimidated continued as though he had never heard Dale’s order for them to cool it. This just infuriated Dale even more who then showed them that he meant business and proceeded to walk from behind the bar to stand about two feet away from Gary and tell him that this was a respectable joint and that if Gary wanted to turn out language like that then he could do it on the street (except Dale did not put it quite as mild as that).
Dale Regan was well over six feet in height and about as wide, he just looked so physically intimidating. This time Gary got the message and let the thing drop. As for me, I just felt so lucky to be in such a respectable joint.
Before long we had two tables of dealers choice cash games going, each one with £2-£2 blinds. We always had the usual banter between tables and the usual arguments about misdeals and other stuff but all in all the players themselves policed the games quite well.
I was avoiding getting myself into any confrontations with Terry even though my stack was up to about £600 by about 4.30am. Terry was splashing the cash like it was going out of fashion, he was always a loose aggressive type of player but tonight really took the biscuit. He was taking down some huge pots as players were calling him down when he had the nuts. By about 6.00am though, Terry was down a very significant amount of money.
Because he had been on my table throughout the session, I could reasonably guess that he was doing around three grand in which for a game of this size is a huge amount of money. He was losing most of this to Steve Yates as they were raising and re-raising each other for fun and Steve seemed to be picking him off.
Most of the players were drinking and Terry had consumed a very large amount of alcohol in the time that I had been there. On the other table was a guy called Stuart Bellingham who was quite a big gambler and would frequent most of the casinos in the area. Rumour had it when I worked in gaming that he was well connected in the Greyhound industry and owned numerous dogs of his own but was also not against getting involved in all round general skulduggery.
Stuart came from Nottingham and he also played in some feisty private games in his home town as well. In fact there was one story circulating that he once got took for fifty grand in a crooked card game and put a contract out on the mechanic who had done it. It wasn’t a poker game as I recall, may have been Brag but I was only a trainee croupier at the time and I was always hearing stories like these.
But it seemed to me that there wasn’t a single person in this cardroom who was on the level but if that was the case, what the hell did that make me? They all knew that I was ex-gaming and I used to get sick and tired of punters asking me for ways to cheat the casinos.
By about 7.30am, Terry had taken one hit too many and retired from the game swearing and cursing as he left…Steve just smiled with satisfaction. My own stack had dipped somewhat and I was still clinging on to my initial and only buy-in and had around four hundred or so. Half an hour earlier I had been all-in with the nuts in an Omaha hand while my opponent held the same hand but was free-rolling for a bigger hand. I held on and split the pot which saved my bacon.
I looked across to the left through the open door and could just about see the bar. Terry and Mandy Li were engaged in conversation and it struck me that they were discussing business and I don’t think that it was to do with bookmaking either. My thoughts were confirmed when I saw them leave and about a minute later, I could hear the clanging of footsteps up the steel external staircase that ran alongside the wall, it made us all chuckle.
Ramdi then raised from under the gun in another Omaha hand, he had barely raised a hand all night although Terry and Steve were probably to blame for that more than anything.
“Ram must have aces” shouted Yilmaz with a broad grin on his face.
Ramdi sat there expressionless…..until everyone folded and he showed his aces and everyone burst out laughing. Now we had lost Terry, the entire game seemed to be far more laid back and more pleasant. The aggression that Terry had brought to the game had gone but the same could not be said of the other table. Gary Rogers was starting things up again and I don’t think that Dale could see or hear what was going off from where he was sitting in the bar.
The music and the television must have been drowning things out because Dale never turned around once. Just then I felt a big thud in my back which almost knocked me across the table I was playing on.
Before I could straighten myself up to see what had caused it, all hell was breaking loose on the table behind me. Gary Rogers and the other bloke who he had been arguing with as they first walked in were involved in a full blown fist fight.
Everybody was grabbing their own cash and no one seemed to be in too much of a hurry to break them up. Although I could hardly blame them, Gary had done a lot of boxing in his youth and could handle himself really well and from the looks of it, so could the bloke who he was scrapping with.
Although all of this cut no ice with Dale as a few seconds later, both Dale and his mate “Lenny the Fag” were tearing into them and breaking it all up. Lenny was a lifelong friend of Dale’s and came by his nickname because of the frequency in which he would do tobacco runs across to France.
The rest of us just all stood there in stunned silence and watched these four blokes going at it, each one a candidate for the British Lions Rugby team in terms of build. The excitement was all too brief as the fracas was over almost as soon as Dale and Lenny entered the room.
Dale was a little rough with Gary even though it had seemed like six of one and half a dozen of the other to me. I kind of got the impression that Dale had taken a dislike to him after what had happened earlier. Lenny was doing some work now for Dale as he had given Lenny a job after he had his collar felt by the customs and excise people after they raided his home and found rather more cigarettes and alcohol than Lenny needed for his own personal use.
In one of his stories, Lenny said that he had one hundred thousand cigarettes in his garage and about a thousand bottles of booze. He was on something of a bad run because the week after he got caught, his wife left him for some bloke who she met at her slimming club.
“I’ve told you once before sunshine…..leave it outside” hollowed Dale no more than several inches from Gary’s face.
Then, almost in mid sentence, Dale turned to me and said,
“You still haven’t paid me for those sandwiches Carl lad”
Dale was amazing, it did not matter what the situation was, nothing seemed to faze him and he would just come out with stuff that bore no relation to what was actually happening. How the hell could this guy be thinking about my sandwiches in the midst of sorting out a brawl?
“Oh…..er…..sorry Dale…..got sidetracked…..I will come to the bar and settle up” I replied.
“Right……FINAL WARNING…..LEAVE IT OUTSIDE…..next time it happens I am coming in here swinging and I aint stopping to ask questions” screamed Dale with Lenny nodding in agreement behind him.
A couple of minutes later, I was at the bar paying Dale for my sandwiches when Gary Rogers walked past me and stood at the door wanting to leave and waiting for Dale to open it with the switch behind the bar. Gary never spoke and neither did Dale, he just opened the door and let him on his way.
After a few seconds Dale without looking up from what he was doing muttered,
“I won’t have trouble in my club”
I got the impression that he wasn’t actually talking to anyone in particular and was more talking to himself than me. I always felt that despite Merrill’s being somewhat of a dive, Dale Regan took great pride in the place.
“Hey Dale, just like the old days”
Lenny “the fag” had walked across and joined us at the bar. Dale still stood in silence and never answered Lenny.
“The girls are working hard tonight Dale judging by how many times we have heard them go up and down that bloody staircase” said Lenny.
“Yeah….I noticed that you went missing for an hour or so earlier Lenny” replied Dale while winking at me at the same time to indicate that he was only joking to which we all had a good laugh.
“Are you up tonight Carl lad?” said Dale.
“Oh….about a couple of hundred” I replied
“I don’t think that the game’s going to last much longer judging by a few of the players” I went on.
“I best get back over there, catch you later Dale…..see you later Len”
The games had settled back down as I entered the cardroom. By this time it was about 8.30am and I was feeling a little past my best in terms of concentration. A couple of the players on the other table were discussing the cash game in Nottingham.
I was interested in going and made an extra effort to overhear the conversation. From what I could gather, the game was above a restaurant in the town centre owned by one of the local Chinese businessmen. Stuart Bellingham would be there as well as “Poacher Pollard” who ran some sort of mob in Nottingham.
The restaurant was owned by a guy called Steve Tang whose name I knew from back when I worked in gaming. As I recall, this guy was heavily connected with the Triads and carried substantial power. All these people with power, money and connections all playing poker with little old me.
I turned around to ask if this game was invite only to which it wasn’t although I was informed that it was better if you went with someone from the local casino cardroom as Steve Tang didn’t like strangers turning up out of the blue. I hadn’t played in Nottingham for quite some time but fancied a night at Tang’s restaurant or above it whichever the case may be.
The game was scheduled for the following Tuesday and I was already pencilling that into my diary when I had made my mind up to leave this game. The players seemed to be doing more talking now than playing and a couple of the players were getting up to leave anyway. Not an awful lot had happened since the brawl which had kind of knocked the stuffing out of a few of the players.
The game at Tang’s was substantially bigger than here, it was £250 minimum sit down with £5 blinds. I would take about a grand with me and no more, I had finally ended this session around £250 up so I would add that to what I had started with and stick another five hundred on top of that and take a shot at it. There was just something about these backstreet private games that appealed to me although you were always at risk from the cheats in these games and especially if you were on your own.
So I grabbed my cash and made my excuses and headed for the door that would take me back into the real world of normal people doing normal jobs and living normal lives.
“Are you off Carl lad?” asked Dale.
“Yeah…..games breaking up” I replied.
“Look after yourself lad” said Dale
It always amused me that Dale called me “lad” although I just think that he used the term for anyone who was younger than him.
“Cheers Dale, catch you later”
Walking down the staircase, I could feel the ever increasing sensation of fresh clean air hitting my face. I’ d had a decent session, won a bit of money with some exciting fisticuffs to boot…next stop Steve Tang’s place.
