Older Company — The Painting, Straff and Gadget

I was about seventeen and already wrapped up with serious people. One of the men we knew was a big-time builder. When Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle had a fire, his company was asked to quote for the repair work. While he was inside he saw a painting that the fire hadn’t touched. He cut it out of its frame. Then he did the stupidest thing he could have done — he folded it into quarters. Ruined it, basically, but he still thought it was worth something.

My mate found a buyer. This was a lad who already had a history of being deported from California. His job was to get the painting into America and sell it. The night before he left we were up at King’s Cross, Bagley’s. That was where he was living at the time. I was selling E. We were in a Fiat Uno rental. He drove it to Holland, dumped it, and flew to Canada from there.

In Canada he took whatever low-paid work he could find and saved until he had enough to travel down to California. When he finally met the buyer it turned out to be an undercover FBI antiques dealer. They caught him with a painting stolen from the Queen. He did twenty-two months in a federal prison — spent most of it sunbathing, by his own account. When they sent him back to Britain he got jailed again for the false passport he’d used.

Believe it or not, the man who actually stole the painting is a magistrate now. I’ve stood in front of him in court. He looked at me, gave me a thumbs-up, and granted me bail.

That’s the world I was moving in at seventeen. People who could cut a painting out of a royal residence one year and sit on the bench the next. Nothing about it felt strange at the time. It was just the company I kept.

One of the best con men I ever met was Richard “Straff” Cawthorne. Real Yankee Cockney. He was one of my peers and party mates, even though there was a clear age gap. That never seemed to matter. No one in that circle ever treated me like a naïve youngster. I was just there, accepted on the same terms as everyone else.

We had some great times. Straff moved through the world with a kind of ease that most people never get to see up close. He wasn’t loud about what he did. He didn’t need to be. The results spoke for him. Being around men like that at that age meant I was taken into rooms and conversations that stayed invisible to almost everyone else. It wasn’t something I earned in any normal sense. It was just the company I kept, and they let me stay.

Looking back, that was one of the strange privileges of that period. The age difference existed, but it was never used against me. I was allowed to stand in the same space as them without being reminded I was still a kid. In a childhood that had offered almost no steady ground, that kind of acceptance carried weight, even if the world it belonged to was built on deception and risk.

Straff was part of that world. Sharp, capable, and fully at home in it. I was lucky enough — or unlucky enough, depending on how you look at it — to be standing next to him while it was still running.

You won’t find much written about Straff. The same goes for his brother.

Gary “Gadget” Cawthorne was the other side of the same coin. Where Straff moved with quiet precision, Gadget operated on a different scale. He was arrested in the Florida Keys with seven and a half thousand kilos of weed. That is not a number you hear every day. It was the kind of weight that turns a man into a federal priority.

They gave him a ten-year sentence. He was out on bond when he decided the American justice system had seen enough of him. He jumped and came home to the UK. Just like that. One day he was looking at a decade inside, the next he was back on familiar ground, another name on the list of men who had slipped the net and returned to the same circles that had raised them.

That was the company. Brothers who could cut paintings from royal residences, move serious weight across oceans, and still end up standing in the same pubs and clubs as the rest of us. Age never seemed to matter. Reputation did. And once you were accepted, the doors stayed open, even when those doors led to places most people never see.

Looking back, it is strange how ordinary it all felt at the time. A magistrate who once stole from the Queen. A con man who treated a seventeen-year-old as an equal. A brother who walked away from a ten-year federal sentence and simply came home. None of it registered as extraordinary then. It was just the world I was in.

Dave Ewing — armed robber — was shot dead by SO19 in Barnes in 1995 after a stolen-car chase. The officer who fired faced a murder charge and was cleared. Proper heavy end. It fitted the circle I was already inside. The names accumulate. The weather does not change.