I was born in 1960 into an East London family - same as my father, and his before him.

A century earlier, in the 1840s, my great-grandfather fled Poland with his wife and children, escaping the persecution of Jews under Russian rule. They came to England chasing safety.

Desperation does that.
It makes somewhere else look like hope.

I never knew my father. He died when I was three.
The only luck I had was being too young to remember him - and too young to be treated like the rest.

I was the youngest of ten. Five boys, five girls.
By the time I arrived, most of them had already gone. Not left - escaped. They rarely came back.

We were poor. My mother survived on a widow’s pension.
Affection was scarce.
Love wasn’t something we recognised, let alone spoke about.

I went to grammar school. I had some brains.
My first job, at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, lasted less than a year. The silence in those corridors felt like a slow death - thick, controlled, suffocating.

I left at sixteen and joined the family transport business.
I didn’t want safety. I wanted movement.

No desk. No tie.
Just fast money - and faster cars.

Within a year I was driving a white Jaguar XJ6.

Then came the Alfa Romeo. The Aston Martin.
One after another.

From the outside, it looked like progress.
Inside, something else was taking shape.

Something colder.

Because in that world, nothing moves without consequence.
Not money. Not goods. Not people.

And pressure doesn’t just come from the outside.
It builds quietly, in the background - until it starts asking questions.

The knock always comes.

And when mine did, it didn’t just divide my life into before and after.
It stripped everything back to what it really was.

Loyalty became conditional.
Silence became currency.

And the deepest cut didn’t come from the system.

It came from blood - from someone who stood close enough to know exactly where to place the knife.

This is a story of injustice, betrayal, and the psychological cost of surviving both.

About the book

Waiting for the Knock is a first-hand account of organised crime, investigation, imprisonment, and appeal - told from inside both the criminal networks and the system built to dismantle them.

It is not a conventional crime memoir. There is no clean arc. No redemption narrative.

Set across the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the book traces a progression - not just into more sophisticated criminal operations, but into a tightening environment of surveillance, informants, and procedural pressure.

As the case builds, the boundaries begin to shift. Legality becomes fluid.
Outcomes hinge less on truth than on timing, documentation, and leverage.

Police, Customs, lawyers, and criminals operate within the same closed system - adapting, negotiating, and applying pressure where it holds. The difference is not always moral. Often, it is positional.

At its centre, Waiting for the Knock is about power - how it accumulates quietly, how it is traded, and how it is used when no one is accountable for how it is applied.

Loyalty becomes conditional.
Silence becomes currency.

Under sustained surveillance, time itself changes.
Every conversation carries risk.
Every absence raises questions.
The knock is no longer an event, but a constant possibility - waiting, just out of sight.

Prison offers no separation from this system. It reflects it.
The same informal rules apply: pressure, coercion, quiet transactions, and consequences that are understood long before they are spoken.

And as the external case tightens, the internal fractures begin.

Betrayal does not arrive dramatically.
It emerges slowly - through hesitation, distance, small inconsistencies.

Until it becomes clear that the most significant breach has not come from the authorities, but from within the family itself.

At that point, the case is no longer just legal.
It is personal.

Written in a restrained, unsentimental voice, Waiting for the Knock avoids justification or resolution. It does not attempt to correct the record or offer moral clarity.

Instead, it documents what happens inside systems that reward silence, exploit pressure, and, over time, begin to resemble the behaviour they claim to control.

This is not a story about guilt or innocence.

It is about survival - and the cost of understanding, too late, how the system really works.