There were men Lenny McLean would fight for money, and there were heroin dealers he would hunt for nothing. To the Governor, a man who sold smack to children was not a criminal. He was a killer, a man who got rich by making addicts and left their families to live among the wreckage. In the 1980s heroin reached Lenny's own world, when it took hold of a man he loved like a brother. What followed, by McLean's own account, was one of the most violent acts of retribution he ever described.
The drug in the paper wraps
By the mid-1980s Britain feared a new kind of killer, one that came folded inside tiny paper wraps. In 1980 Malcolm Owen, singer of the punk band The Ruts, died of a heroin overdose at 26. Five years later a 14-year-old boy died after a mix of heroin and methadone bought within minutes of his own front door. He was a child. Heroin had stopped being a back-alley problem for hardened addicts and had reached schoolchildren. The government answered with its Heroin Screws You Up posters.
Lenny did not need a poster. He understood drink, gambling and violence. What he could not understand was someone who would sell poison to children. He had two young children of his own, and every story about a dealer near a school gate hit the fear every parent carries.
A friend and his wife
Growing up, Lenny had a best friend as close to him as his own brothers. Over the years they lost touch. The friend had done well for himself and built a comfortable life for his family. Then he started chasing the dragon, smoking heroin off foil, and when smoking was no longer enough he moved on to injecting it.
The film describes the family coming apart piece by piece. His business fell away, the money drained out of the house and his promises stopped meaning anything. Behind it all was a dealer working out of Hoxton, getting richer as the family got poorer and more frightened. In the end his wife did the one thing her husband had begged her never to do. She rang Lenny.
According to McLean's own account, she had the dealer's name but no address. For most people that would have been the end of it. Hoxton was not an anonymous place. Names travelled through the pubs, gyms and door firms. Lenny started asking questions.
The toilets
Before that hunt was finished, another suspected dealer walked into a club where Lenny ran the door. A new doorman, only days into the job, pointed out a man in the corner and said he was recently out of prison for supplying drugs that had killed children.
Lenny went down with another doorman and found the man in the toilets with two young buyers. The buyers were searched, their names taken, and sent away. The dealer would not open his mouth, so Lenny forced it open until four wraps of white powder hit the floor. What followed, the film says, was not a fight but a punishment. McLean later said he hit the man while thinking of every child who had died from drugs like those. When it was over he had his doormen take the man to St Bartholomew's Hospital. He did not want a murder charge. He later admitted he might have gone too far, but he never apologised for the hatred behind it. In his mind, a man who knowingly sold poison to children was no different from a man who fired a gun at them.
Four flights up
By then Lenny knew where the Hoxton dealer lived. He parked up outside and waited. When the man came down the street, checked it once more and turned his key, Lenny hit him through the doorway. The dealer got up and ran for the stairs, and Lenny chased him up four flights, by his own description like a greyhound out of the traps. At the top there was nowhere left to go. By McLean's account he drove the man through the top window and held him out over the street, bleeding and begging, and told him exactly why he had come. The dealing stopped that day, or the next visit would be the last. Then he pulled him back in and left. By McLean's own account, that man never dealt again.
The fight he could not win
When Lenny went back to the family weeks later, nothing had changed. His friend was still using. The heroin kept arriving from somewhere else. Take out one supplier and another steps in.
He watched a man he remembered as a live wire turn into what he called a wreck. He still loved his friend like a brother, but he would not let heroin anywhere near his own front door, and when the friend came out of prison and tried to get in touch, Lenny gave him a false address.
He could hunt down a dealer, chase him up four flights and hang him out of his own window. He could not beat heroin out of somebody he loved. Lenny McLean spent his life believing fear and force could solve almost anything put in front of him. Heroin was the one enemy that proved him wrong.