I was born in 1960 into an East London family, same as my father and his before him. Back 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. That’s what desperation does:
it makes another country look like hope.

I never knew my father, as he died when I was three years old. The only luck I had was not being old enough to be beaten and abused like the rest of my siblings.

I was the youngest of ten – five boys, five girls.

By the time I came along most of them had already left home.

Escaped really. They rarely came back. We were a poor family, and my mother got by on her
widow’s pension. Affection was scarce.

Love wasn’t something we talked about or recognised.

I went to grammar school. I had some brains. My first job with the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall lasted less than a year.

The silence in those corridors felt like a slow death – the air thick, the boredom suffocating.
Still only sixteen, I left and joined the family transport business.

I needed excitement. The appeal wasn’t hard to understand: no desk, no tie, just fast
money, and faster cars. Within a year, I drove a white Jaguar XJ6. Then came
the Alfa Romeo, the Aston Martin, and the rest of the fleet.

But underneath the shine lay something else.

Something colder.

The knock always comes eventually. And when mine did, it didn’t just split my life in two.

It showed me who had been standing with me,

and who had been standing just behind me with a knife.

This is my story about injustice, familial betrayal, and the psychological price of survival.

About the book

Waiting for the Knock is a first-hand narrative of organised crime, investigation, imprisonment, and appeal, told from inside both the criminal world and the justice system that pursues it.

Rather than a conventional crime memoir or redemption story, the book examines how informal systems shape outcomes within the British criminal justice process.

Set across the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, the book traces a gradual descent into increasingly sophisticated criminal operations alongside the parallel rise of surveillance, informants, and procedural shortcuts.

As police, Customs, lawyers, and criminals manoeuvre around one another, the distinction between legality and illegality becomes less about morality and more about leverage, paperwork, and timing.

At its core, Waiting for the Knock is a study of power: how it is accumulated, traded, withheld, and abused. The narrative explores loyalty as a transactional currency, the corrosive effect of long-term surveillance, and the psychological toll of living under constant threat of arrest. Prison is not treated as spectacle, but as an extension of the same systems — governed by informal rules, coercion, and quiet brutality.

The book also confronts betrayal at its most intimate level, as family ties fracture under pressure from informant culture and institutional incentives. These personal ruptures become inseparable from the legal case itself, raising questions about responsibility, complicity, and survival within closed systems.

Written in a restrained, unsentimental voice, Waiting for the Knock avoids self-justification or moral posturing. It neither glamorises crime nor offers easy absolution.

Instead, it presents a psychologically grounded account of how individuals adapt to systems that reward silence, punish hesitation, and often mirror the behaviour they claim to oppose.

Blending lived experience with close observation of institutional behaviour, Waiting for the Knock sits at the intersection of narrative nonfiction, memoir, and social critique. It will appeal to readers interested in true crime with intellectual depth, the hidden mechanics of the justice system, and stories that resist simple moral conclusions.