Heather Bellamy heard John Lawson's story.

John Lawson

John Lawson was a man with a reputation among the violent men in some of the UK's major cities. Riding with a biker gang, he graduated to 'debt collecting' for international racketeers, living a life full of brutality and crime. While serving his third jail sentence he finally changed his way of life and now travels widely speaking in prisons and other venues. He's just released his biography If A Wicked Man and Heather Bellamy heard his life story.

Heather: What was life like growing up?

John: My early childhood was fantastic. We were born into a lot of poverty in the Maryhill area of Glasgow, but you don't see that when you're a kid.

I had two loving parents and when I was three years old, we headed off for a new life in South Africa. My dad became a policeman out there and it was a huge contrast to what we had in Glasgow. I could play outside, we could climb trees and there were monkeys. It was an amazing childhood. My little brother was born when I was six and I really hero worshipped my dad, because he was a policeman and I was always going to the shooting range with him. There came a point in my life where things changed dramatically though.

Heather: Before we move onto that, could you just describe what you were like as a boy at that point in your life?

John: My mum always used to say that little old ladies loved me and that I was quite a shy, polite, well-spoken and well-mannered little boy.

In South Africa in those days, you were brought up differently to how kids are now. You had a lot of respect instilled in you for elders, so any older person I came across was always referred to as 'Auntie' or 'Uncle'. I was just a normal happy little boy that liked playing out.

Heather: What you've shared doesn't sound like a recipe for becoming a violent man. What happened?

John: When you look back on your life, with retrospect you can see things that happened. What happened with me, was my mum had to go back to the UK fairly quickly, because my grandfather had terminal cancer and we didn't know how long he was going to last. She went back to the UK with my little brother and I was finishing off a term at school. One of two things were going to happen, either my father and I were going to join my mother later after the funeral, or my mum was going to come back to South Africa.

Nobody knew that my dad was having an affair with another woman though. One day he picked me up from school, on the last day of term and I was just 10 years old. He locked me in our flat and told me not to get scared if it gets dark and just to put myself to bed and that he would be working late. He went off with this woman and he never returned.

Fortunately I was only locked inside the flat for four days. I hadn't eaten for a couple of days, but some family friends had phoned the flat and found me in a bit of a distressed state. They broke open the door and they helped me get back to the UK to be with my mum.

Both my grandparents died quite quickly; my mum received the news that her husband was having an affair and don't bother coming back and our whole life was back in South Africa. The only place we could find to live in those days, was to go back to Scotland. We got shipped out. I use the expression 'shipped out' because that's what it felt like. We got shipped out to what was known at the time, as the worst housing estate in the whole of Europe. It was an estate with a very bad reputation, called Drumchapel, just outside Glasgow.

That's where this polite little boy got really picked on. I spoke differently and acted differently to my peers. I realised that you earn respect with your fists and that violence was to become a friend of mine in that culture. Also, I was a little bit angry now, because of what my dad had done and I hated the situation we were in. That began to shape me and I got into lots of fights at school.

John on far right aged 9 with father and brother

A few years later, we moved to Birkenhead in Merseyside and the whole thing started again. I had no father figure and I was just being a real idiot, Heather. I was going out breaking into factories and stealing things. I think my mum thought I was an angel, I kept so much from her. By the time I left school, I was really good at playing rugby and fighting and I just wanted money. I wanted to change my life with money. I believed money could answer all of life's problems.