Basildon Dean makes no claim to be a gangster. He is a Basildon man who spent years on the doors of a superclub he describes as explosive all the time, then went into debt collecting for builders who had been left unpaid.
The overspill
His parents came from Bethnal Green. His two older brothers were born there, and his mother moved to Basildon while she was pregnant with him. He was born in 1974 and has lived there ever since. Basildon was a new town, all greenery and parks, and Dean says the families around him on the council estate had nearly all been moved out of the East End through slum clearances. Children who fell out were told to fight, straighten it out and be mates again half an hour later. It was, he says, as if a piece of the East End had been lifted up and put down in Essex.
The town always had a name for being rough. By his account there were only two real venues when he was young: Time, where you had to wear a shirt with a collar, and Raquels, where almost anyone could get in. Across the road was a pub, the Bullseye, which he says had a name for glassings.
The gym
He started training at about 15, and by 19 he was bodybuilding at Progress House, a gym well known for doormen. That is where, he says, he first met Tony Tucker, who was introduced to him by the gym's owner. Dean remembers a man who said little and patted him on the back.
Tucker was murdered in 1995. Dean says it shook the doormen at the gym, because it brought home that it did not matter what your name or your reputation was. If someone wanted you, they would take you.
The superclub
When he left school in 1990 he went into building work with his father. He came to the doors almost by chance: work was scarce, he had just had an operation and could not lift, and a tattooist friend knew the area manager of a door firm. Dean went over with his brother, met a man called AJ, and was taken on.
The venue was the new superclub on Basildon's leisure park: four clubs over several floors, joined by interlinking doors after 11 o'clock, holding nearly 4,000 people. By his account they started with 40 doormen after a refit and were down to about 16 by the time he left, still with a couple of thousand people in on a night. By then, he says, groups of men booked tables for champagne and vodka, and because they spent big they were let in. When it kicked off it was a war: take one out and you had ten to deal with, and if they were not fighting the door they were fighting each other.
He describes the system the door used: wedging a fire exit shut, dealing with the men inside, dragging them down the stairs, then opening the door again to let the next lot through and trap them. One night, he says, a man of about seven foot and 30 stone was held down by eight of them, and when they got off him he was not breathing. Site security ran up with a defibrillator and brought him round. When things are bad, he says, you laugh a lot.
Committed
The thing that angered him most on the door, Dean says, was men who were brave against easy targets and found a reason, a mortgage or children, when someone serious turned up. His view is that if you are standing there, you do whatever it takes. He says he found that loyalty in the men he worked with most closely, Russian Andre and a group of Albanian doormen. A man who pretends to fight you, he says, is testing you, and any weakness you show will be used.
He was arrested once. A big man, he says, claimed Dean had tried to put his eyes out, but there was no CCTV and the charges were dropped.
The debts
At about 40 he moved into debt collecting, mostly for builders who had done contract work and been told the company had gone into liquidation. His method, by his account, was paperwork first, then a phone call asking to meet, and then, for those who ignored him, a polite knock early on a Sunday morning to say the debt was not going away. He says the same people often had a string of liquidated companies behind them, while the subcontractor at the bottom of the chain could lose everything. He went as far as Aberdeen and back in a day. One thing he would never touch, he says, was drug debts.
Today the door is behind him, he is mostly out of debts, and he is due to start a demolition company. His last word on the life is that nobody is unbeatable. The bigger and badder you get, he says, the more likely some youngster just shoots you.