Updated 12/28/09

I've made some changes to the original (combining chapters 4&5) after accidentally deleting chapter8 (now chapter 7). Please forgive my perfectionism...

This story is the real story of Gangster 55, based on the movie Gangster No. 1 by Paul McGugain. It's told from the Gangster's point of view.

WARNINGS: heavy language, somewhat-sadistic-gang-violence, and I've tweaked the story line so there's some slash... don't like? don't read. Really easy on you, honest...

Please review (although I'm sure you're probably sick of reading that) and, even if you think I'm perfect and don't review, ENJOY!!!!

Chapter 1:

This is my story and it's for whoever finds it first…

My name is Archer Sloane and I was born in London, to a pawn shop broker and a waitress. I was the forth child out of seven, the middle child, the one everyone forgot about. When Annie and Ashley were born, mum immediately focused on her two little girls, leaving dad to take care of the rest of us. I slowly learned to hate her for that, because my father, as kind as he may have seemed to some, wasn't a good man.

He was a cheat, and a liar, and he'd do favors for others only when he could benefit from it. Cash was his motivator. I watched him blackmail people – I delivered the letters – and I watched him hire hit men to "take care of" someone he didn't like. Scotch was my father's only real friend. I can't remember him without a glass in his hand, unless he set it down, and you never wanted him to set his glass down if you were within arm's reach of him. You'd get walloped. Hard. And he'd hit you again if you cried; he said it would make a man out of you. I don't know if it made me a man.

I only know that it made me hate him.

He and my brother's would taunt me, and eventually their insults and jibes became ingrained in my mind. I believed every word they said. They were right, I was a freak: they'd told me this often enough and I could see the proof with my own eyes. I looked different then any of them, with my pale hair and blue eyes and pale skin, and I wasn't incredibly handsome, or clever, or funny, or athletic, or… well, anything really. Unlike the rest of my brothers, I was gangly and uncoordinated – I was the resident klutz, always running into furniture and breaking things. I was just there, watching from the corner.

I became, what I supposed you'd call, a "troubled youth." That phrase is bullshit. All it means is that you don't fit in and you know it, and this makes you upset (no shit), so you vent your feelings. But that's not what the shrink told me when I was in the first form. Said that I had to try harder to overcome my issues. Said it would take time. Said she felt sorry for me. Said she understood. All very kuum-bi-ya. So she sent me to a correction facility.

I got out, three years later, when I was 16, and only my little sister Annie was still in London - attending a boarding school. I discovered I'd been disowned. That wasn't a good time. Not good at all. I had no place to live, I had to scrounge for food, slept on the streets wrapped in sheets I'd stolen of laundry lines… I finally decided that there was nothing else for it…

I'd have to turn to crime if I wanted to eat. So, when I was 18, I became a bagman for Maxie King, before he started working for Lennie Taylor. That was 1962.

In 1965, I was a bouncer.

1966, bartender.

1967, professional card shark.

But when everything happens, when this story really begins, it was 1968. And I was still, even at 24, a "troubled" bloke. I still hated my mother for leaving, for not caring. I still hated my father for drinking, for taking everything out on me. I still hated my brothers and sisters for being oh so bloody perfect. I still hated myself.

Over the past thirty years, that hatred has turned itself into resentment. A bitter, harsh, painful resentment: that I had to work harder than the others to get hired, that he chose that...that... gold digger over me, at what I had to do to stop Lennie Taylor from taking over, at the fact that no one trusted me. They never gave me a chance to prove myself: prove that I have brains, more so than most, and that I do care about people...

Maybe that's my problem. Maybe I care too much.

But I'm bitching and that's not the point of this introduction. The point is to inform you, who ever you are, that I, Archer Sloane, was a gangster. The money collecting, head bashing, petrol bombing, cocaine dealing kind. I was good at it too. Now, I'm in charge of London. I'm now number one.

I started out, as I've mentioned, as a bartender and pool hall piss-artist. I eventually scraped enough together to get by and lived in a one room flat: communal bathroom, leaking roof, window that wouldn't shut, cockroaches, rats… And I'd pretty much given up getting anywhere… and being anyone…

But then, I was hired by Freddie Mays.

Freddie Mays, the Butcher of Mayfair. The man was a god damned legend in those days. Killed a copper in Bethanal Green and got away with it. That was the way to hit the top, see. Kill a cop. Make a splash. Zoom to the top of the ladder like a bloody gas balloon.

My break came while I was playing snooker with Jack the Lad. Fat Charlie came in. (Fat Charlie wasn't really fat, but his mum was and it was the way we distinguished him from Skinny Charlie. Now he was fat, but by then it was too late to change it…)

Anyway, Fat Charlie comes up to me and says: "Go and see Freddie Mays."

My heart was beating like mad, but I went. And was shocked to find, not the ruthless maniac I'd expected, but a gentleman. Italian leather. Champagne. Class. A class act. The word "impressive" re-defined. And he hired me on the spot, gave me five hundred quid, right off to get me kit out in a nice set of suits.

Me, an arseholed fag from Lambeth. I don't know what he saw in me. Muscle, maybe? Or desperation? It didn't really matter to me. I'd started working for Freddie Mays.

And working for Freddie Mays was different than anything else I'd ever done. It was brilliant, it was, it was fun, it was… God… fucking easy. I mean, honestly, what did I do for a living, while working for Mr. Mays? I tracked down people who owed him money, got the money from them, messed them up a bit if they didn't have it, terrified them into submission if they resisted, and then I'd come back to Freddie's flat for all the whiskey I'd like, and a fucking leather settee. All for £500 a month. Tailor included.

Brilliant.

Our biggest worry was Lennie Taylor, but at the beginning, you couldn't even call him a worry. Sure he was the head of a rival gang and he and Freddie at a bit of history, but he kept to his half of London, and so we kept to ours. Nothing more than the occasional skirmish. Personally, I was more worried about his number two: Maxie King. I had my own bit of history with him. He was a greasy fag, always wore this camel-hair coat, and always skulking about where he shouldn't have been. I didn't like him being on Lennie Taylor's side. But, like I've said, that all wasn't too much of a worry for us…

Freddie's Boys.

There we were, suited up and booted up. Wasted on those fucking toe rags we called debtors. But I enjoyed the work – it was my type of job, one that needed a steel jaw, a quick fist a sharp eye, a gutsy loyalty, and a quick mind that could produce a solution to a problem efficiently and quietly.

And I wasn't the only member of the gang who enjoyed the risks that went along with the job: I quickly became friends with Mad John, Freddie May's gunman. The two of us became inseparable - I made him my right hand man when I took over - and while we spent half our time beating up slags, the rest we spent talking, clubbing, attempting to make food without poisoning ourselves, watching movies or playing poker. (We eventually moved on to strip poker. I didn't mind so much, John was easy to beat.)

At about one or two in the morning, I'd go back to the flat that I shared with my sister, Annie. She was usually asleep when I came home, but, then, she started work at six in the morning whereas I started at nine, usually. She'd have my breakfast sitting in the oven, any clean laundry folded – she was a lovely girl. Annie tended to turn a blind eye to what I did at work: she wouldn't ask what I'd been up to and I wouldn't offer any information. This arrangement suited us both just fine.

My brother Andrew, on the other hand, came over once or twice a week and he was nosy as hell. Useful as a chocolate teapot too. Never got two words of sense out of him strung together, him being a fucking rent boy. But he was harmless; a good kid, and he'd look after Annie whenever I was away. John sometimes would come over for Sunday dinner and it always amused me to listen the two of them. They were two of a kind. Both absolutely mental. It made for interesting conversation.

I never heard from the rest of my family. Like I've said, they didn't like me so much.

But they weren't the only ones. Oh, John was grand, a true wide boy (even if he was a right mardy) and Charlie was a china, too. Roland was all right, Billy was a bit of a flid, Derek was a total anorak (that eventually got on my nerves), and Eddie was a milksop. But Tommy, Freddie's right-hand man... Tommy pissed me off right from the start. Had the attitude of a fucking rozzer. Always harping on everything me or John did. And because he was in charge of assignments, guess who got all the muscle work? Not that we minded, but still… he treated us like we were gormless cunts… He was a fucking arsehole.

But we made the best of it, John and I, had our fun with it anyway. I think it pissed him off and I'm sure that didn't help Freddie's opinion of me. But, then, I screwed it up royally all on my own…

I suppose I might as well be honest, no one's going to fucking care. Not now. No one's left. That's all my fault too..... See, it all started with that incident with Giggler Bennett. Well, actually it started before that, but the Giggler Bennett Affair was the spark – set the rest of the fireworks off, one by one… And, of course, that's when everything – abso-fucking-lutely everything – started to go wrong...