I knew the law of the streets in New York, so I was well aware that people got killed when they were not remotely in the wrong, it was just a matter of violent ignorance. I pulled myself away and started to walk across to my cousin Woodia’s house. I was not strolling, I was walking as fast as I could while still keeping my dignity and not looking spooked. The first time someone pulls a gun on you, you’re shaking, you’re genuinely terrified. With typical Jamacian humour though, these two big ladies in their 30s were watching this scenario play out down below and as I walked very quickly across the street they were laughing. ‘Look ‘ow faas’ ‘im a waalk!’ New York . . . boy, it can be a tough place to live.
A year later, I was in the same dominoes club playing a game with a man I was quite friendly with. He had heard of my close escape and knew the chap who had thrust the gun in my face. He told me that about three weeks after he threatened me, the same fellow had been killed in a shoot-out. The lesson to take from this was simple: if you are a bad guy, an inconsiderate ruffian or a bully, there is always someone nastier, more malicious just around the corner. That’s what happened – he got killed. You reap what you sow.
My cousin Woodia, who had pulled me on that banana leaf all those years ago in Jamaica, lived in and ran his business from New York. He sold drugs. That was his trade. My business was training, succeeding at school and keeping out of trouble. These had been my obsessions. Despite my substantial dalliances with the criminal life, I could never have been involved in selling drugs, it wasn’t part of my make-up. Shoplifting I could do. Selling drugs was just killing people and bad karma, totally different. One was preying on the weak, the other was stealing to feed yourself.
Although these were the very circles I was trying to avoid, Woodia was family: I loved him. After I had made a different life for myself and my family in England, whenever I was in New York I would always go and visit old friends, some of whom were still wrapped up in the darker side of life. On one trip I went to see Woodia at the house where he lived and from where drugs were sold.
It was a basement apartment with a wire mesh covering the streetside windows. I rang the bell and noticed several faces peering through the meshed glass. The door buzzed and I started to work my way down the dark stairs, but halfway down Woodia’s friend, Freedom, met and escorted me towards the thick door at the bottom. He knocked twice on the door and I went in – next thing I knew, I had three guns pointing at my forehead, an Uzi, a Colt 45 and a .38 calibre pistol. I said, ‘Hey! Woodia! It’s Chris, I’m your cousin, man, what’s all this?’ He said, ‘That doesn’t matter, Chris, this is my business.’
Woodia died prematurely, aged 27. The word was that one of his girlfriends had poisoned him. One night, while eating a Chinese take-away, he died where he was sitting. One of the regrets in my life is that I didn’t go to his funeral. Forget a man’s wedding, they come and go, people get married several times. Always see a man off, it only happens once. I thought, wrongly, that I was too busy to fly to New York for his funeral. I was wrong: you can never be too busy for the people you care about.
I met many people through Alan Sedaka, one of whom was Benjamin Aryeh, not a nice character. He didn’t do anything illegal, but in business he was very cold. None of the people who worked for him liked him and I could see why. The first time I met Benjamin, he offered me a job as a gopher. I really needed a job at the time, but I didn’t take him up on his offer – this is because I asked him about his footwear. ‘Nice shoes. Those are crocodile, right?’ He shrugged his shoulder and said, ‘I don’t know, someone bought them for me. Are they crocodile?’ From that second, I was not interested in him or the job, it was not for me. He had played down something which was just a simple compliment. That first impression sealed it. Even though I needed the money. I wanted the right kind of money. The going rate would have been fine. It’s respect I need.
Benjamin had a brother, a lovely guy called Nathanial, whom I used to bodyguard for in New York. I would go to casinos or clubs with him and watch his back. It was a bit silly really, because I didn’t have a gun and if you are going to bodyguard someone in New York, you have to carry a firearm. However, my aura was one of psychological dominance. My presence was imposing, so people would instinctively back off. I looked very dangerous – my eyes burned with savage focus. Plus, I always dressed impeccably, even back then. I always had my designer clothes from England and snake-skin shoes; I was probably the city’s best-dressed bodyguard.
In places like New York, if someone is thinking of attacking they will first survey the terrain and weigh up the risks. Even though I did not carry a gun, my presence was sufficient to nullify any threats, because Nathanial’s terrain was perceived as too risky to attack. I never thought about being unarmed, and the courage and presence I displayed meant that no one ever did pull a gun, thank God.
In hindsight, Nathanial gave me the bodyguard job just to make himself look good with his girlfriends. Occasionally, he would ask me to go to a club with him and a girl, but mainly to watch her. If the couple separated, I would be following the girl through all the darkened rooms and labyrinthine passages of somewhere like The Tunnel (an underground station converted into a club) while she would play games and try to lose me. I got paid $200 each time I went out with him. This wasn’t a scary job, after all I was a fighter, but also he wasn’t a bad guy looking for trouble. He wasn’t a flash man, although he had his little Porsche. He wasn’t courting danger. He was just a nice guy.
Nathanial was landlord of a building in a middle class area, a really run-down slum of a place, near 17th Street and Chelsea. One day in 1986, I went with him to collect some rents that were a little overdue. At this stage, I was 4 and 0 as a professional boxer. One of the tenants we went to see was a gentleman called Walter Johnson, whom I now know as ‘Doctor’. Nathanial had brought me to this property as the heavy guy. He said to me, ‘Look mean, be very quiet and menacing, and get us paid.’
Doctor lived in a little studio flat with all his belongings which he shared with his daughter Kali, whom he had brought up. Nathanial left me for a while when he went to see someone else and, although I had this very hard exterior, Doctor was not fazed at all. In fact, after a few moments he quietly said to me, ‘Come back another time, I’d like to talk to you.’ Nathanial had introduced me as this ultra-hard, up-and-coming boxer. What I didn’t know at first was that Doctor was heavily into the martial arts, having studied them since he was ten. He had been coached by his own father and become exemplary at jiu-jitsu and many other forms. That day we met, he relished the opportunity to talk to someone about his passion for such skills, how deeply he had studied and how much he knew about the philosophy behind them.
Two or three months went by when, one day, I found myself in that same area of New York, so I decided to take Doctor up on his offer and drop in for a chat. Even though he is 17 years my senior, the relationship just took off from there. In fact, this older element of his wisdom was part of what fascinated me. He would come to the gym and just watch, he never said anything. I had trainers with me and he always stayed and observed the workout. He struck me as someone who had an innate and vastly experienced sense of the street – obviously his colossal knowledge of martial arts bestowed that upon him, but even little things made me smile and warm to him. For example, one especially cold day, I asked him if he had a hat and he pulled off his own, tugged another hat out of that one and gave it to me. I called him Doctor in reference to the combination of his knowledge of Eastern medicine plus his philosophy of life and martial arts.
Despite our strange first meeting, we got on very well. When I moved to the UK in 1988, we kept in touch by phone. When I travelled to see the Mike McCallum-Steve Collins fight in Boston and stayed at the Plaza Hotel in New York, I met up with Doctor