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May 16, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:01:07
Gangster To God - Notorious British Gangster Reveals How Christianity Saved Him - Stay Free #367
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Brought to you by Pfizer.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand, and what a special day it is where we have the opportunity to talk about transition and transformation.
Many of you will have been following my journey of late, and this will give me the first opportunity to talk about those things in a new context with someone who's a little further down the path than me, who's experienced some very extreme Life experiences.
If you're watching us on YouTube, we'll be available there for the first 15 minutes, then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble.
Remember, you can become an Awakened Wonder, then you can join us for these conversations live and exclusive when they happen, as well as getting access to exclusive videos every single week and the opportunity to meditate with us and join our book club where we're reading Mere Christianity.
My guest today, Michael Emmett, has experienced a life of incredible extremes.
Extreme drug smuggling, extreme wealth, extreme addiction, extreme criminality and extreme incarceration before coming to Christ and walking a very different path.
Today we'll be having a conversation About the entirety of that journey, the important life lessons that have been learned and what we can all take from the transition from a life defined by material want, scarcity, longing and fear to the transcendence that is available to all of us on a journey of faith that Michael has undertaken and that I am with trepidation, vulnerability and I pray humility undertaking myself.
Michael, thank you so much for Thank you for joining me.
My pleasure.
That was a great introduction.
Thanks very much.
It was lovely to meet you the other day, participating in your podcast that you've currently suspended, which focuses, as I understand the podcast being Gritty Nitty, the journey of life in recovery, where you and a couple of other friends of ours in recovery from multiple addictions, our mate Tosca, our mate Mark Dempster, talk about various aspects of life in recovery, the challenges that people face.
You have an extraordinary Story to tell, in particular, I suppose, for those of us that have never been part of that world, the transition from living a life of crime, as they call it, defined by that what from the outside appears like ludicrous grammar, excuse me, ludicrous glamour, possibly ludicrous grammar,
I mean, you know some good slang.
And I wonder, can you, first of all, for those of us that aren't familiar with you, for the people who haven't yet read your book, Sins of Fathers, can you just tell us what your original condition and family of origin were and how you ended up pursuing what, to most people, is a pretty extraordinary life, in particular the various enterprises around smuggling?
Yeah, so early days, I mean, I've got, there's two halves of my family, yeah?
So one's my father's line and one's my mother's line.
So my mother, there was a judgment from me that one was really lovely and it was wrong because I've learned a lot about Um, spiritual stuff that makes me understand that we should not judge, because we don't know what lies beneath.
So my mother's family was like South London people.
They were flower people.
They were in the flower industry, Borough Market, Covent Garden.
And my father came from a very dysfunctional family, not out of choice.
He was extremely bright, extremely bright.
But there was a dysfunction.
They say my grandfather was shot in the Second World War.
He was slightly disabled.
And they called him Sticks.
And he killed himself by drinking acetone.
And they found him with the lining of his stomach coming out of his mouth.
And that was how my dad got brought up.
My mother got brought up in a family that were flower sellers.
They were old-fashioned.
Hello, mate.
Love the piano.
You know, that sort of bouffant hairstyle.
Full eyelashes.
And that's what it was like.
So we're talking about London in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, like, you know, so it's flowers and glamour and joy and tickling the ivories, playing the old Joanna, gathering around the piano on one side, but you described a pretty incredible darkness on the other side.
Am I right about the general era, post-war London?
Yeah, that's exactly what it was.
So we come out the flats, my father come from Battersea, Now, my mother's... My grandmother, I think she had nine or eleven brothers and sisters.
And my grandfather had sort of the same.
And they was out of Bermondsey, The Elephant and Castle.
But they were a fun family.
They were blessed to have sort of just kindness and love.
And they were really cool people.
Now, my dad's side, sadly, my grandmother Alice was lovely, but my grandfather, he suffered badly.
Now, I only learnt about it as I grew older and learnt about my faith, what the answer was.
And it breaks my heart that him and my father sort of suffered at the hands of that darkness, yeah?
And my dad tried to break out of it.
Now, when I look at my cousins, there's been a problem there, emotionally and spiritually.
But I grew up in the flats in South London, in Stockwell, And then I got taken down to Morden in Surrey when I was about six.
But I was impregnated with a madness at a very early age.
What were your dad doing for a living in that early part of your life to have the money to put you in what I understand was an alright school down there in Morden in Surrey?
Well yeah, yeah.
So my dad, he was a criminal.
He was a career criminal.
It was his career?
It was his career!
Stop it.
It was.
It was his career.
Excuse me.
War baby.
My grandfather, he used to be the rag and bone man in Battersea.
So my dad's duty was get up in the morning, go and get the awesome carp by Arden & Hobbs and come down.
So he suffered.
He used to nick early days the stuff out of Arden & Hobbs to take home to his mother to feed.
What is Arden & Hobbs?
Arden & Hobbs was a department store on the corner.
Sorry, Arden & Hobbs.
It's a department store.
At Clapham Junction, opposite the station.
So all the stuff used to get delivered there, the bread, and where he was up early to get the horse, he'd have a fever up outside.
So it was a nature to him, a survival.
And then he went to a very good school.
He went to university.
Back in the day, it was a technical choice, like a surveyor.
His dad had high hopes for him.
He'd run at White City for the England youth in the 440.
He boxed at a good level, but he had it in him to... He was dysfunctional.
My mother was completely opposite, so there was a mixture of opposites.
But somehow, the love that my mum had, He relished.
Four marriages, seven kids he had.
Now this part of the family, not to disrespect the other children because he loved them and all.
But it was an extension of his ego to prove that he had goodness in him.
So my sister Karen, she got the Bachelor of Arts at Liverpool University.
It was the happiest day of his life.
But I was like him.
Not out of choice.
Just out of choice.
And he was at it.
He had car fronts, used to sell car, you know, had a car front over in Endon.
He had a commercial lorry business in Battersea.
But he was a drug smuggler.
Let's drop that in.
So it's like legitimate businesses selling used cars, legitimate businesses doing transportation, and one can see how that might align quite nicely with other aspects.
It sort of started it.
Really?
Yeah.
I'm thinking like, so is this in the 19, in the 1960s and 70s involved in importing drugs into the United Kingdom?
So even while you're a little kid, this way of life, this business is established for you.
Not then.
No?
Not in the 60s, but he was at it.
So whatever he used to do, you know, he was around the infamous.
He was around the great train robbers.
He knew the twins, Ronnie and Reggie.
He knew Freddie Foreman, who was... Fred was his mate.
But also, he also... He didn't like the publicity.
So he lived quite cunningly.
He took his crime life extremely important.
He wouldn't be seen in the wrong places.
They knew about him because he could have a right fight, my dad.
He was a small guy, Irish descent.
But my sister and my brother, my brother died tragically, they were what he foresees as love.
Because he couldn't experience love, he didn't have the ability to receive.
And he could fire.
He used to do karate.
He used to run the course at Epsom Downs, two miles.
And I used to watch him, and he was such a fit man.
But he had the thing in here that I know about today.
He was impregnated with something that weren't right.
Yeah, a kind of a compelling darkness.
You've mentioned briefly that ecology, a crime that emerged out of London around that time, and for people that have studied, and that is a sort of word I suppose, that scene.
It's full, from the outside at least, as a simple observer, with incredibly colourful characters.
The Richardsons, of South London.
You've mentioned the Kray twins and the little cultures that formed around them, as well as the Great Train Robbers.
Indeed, I suppose there are Hollywood movies about the Great Train Robbers, about the Krays of course, on numerous renderings of their extraordinary life story, and the Richardsons too.
What do you, as a person that was growing up around that, think was uniquely interesting about those characters and about that way of life?
Why does it, whether it's American organized crime through the mafia and the sort of genre of films that has spawned, to London-based gang crime, or even Peaky Blinders and other regional iterations of crime, What, as a person that has been, is part of it, what has been in the past, been part of it, what is it about that world, do you suppose, that captures the attention at a cultural level of so many people?
What is it about those characters, having known them and been around them, that do you think renders them so magnetic?
Please, Michael.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, fantastic.
So, It's funny, because you teach children stuff, yeah?
Now, I wasn't taught to be a criminal, right?
In fact, it was opposite to that.
We wound up in Epsom.
But I used to see people... I mean, I was there the day Eddie Richardson came out of prison.
He'd come over to my dad's yard.
And I was about 17.
But prior to that, my dad's friends...
JC, Arthur, they was all renowned villains.
Bank robbers, blowsayers, prison escapes.
And it was like, it was if, it was presented to me like it weren't wrong.
They wouldn't talk about their crimes, but I knew they were.
You'd see them in the newspapers and things like that.
But it was bizarre.
It sort of emerged into my life and grew without going, oh, they're criminals.
Like, I lived opposite a vicar, and I knew he was a vicar, and I knew we had to keep our mouths shut, you know?
But I wasn't taught it.
It's funny, the subconscious mind... My sister knew about it, but she pretended it didn't happen.
My younger brother knew about it and he was a bright kid, he was alright with it.
But I sort of... It was like sugar to me.
I quite liked it.
I started nicking in Woolworths when I was a kid of 11.
And then when I sort of gravitated to the scene myself, against my old man's wishes, really against my old man's wishes, I got nicked when I was 13.
And he helped to sort my school.
We used to have a speaker there, down in Wimbledon it was, and it was Lord Longford.
I don't know if you know about Lord Longford.
It was bonfire night and all I wanted to do was mess about.
Because Lord Longford is known for reform and visiting prisoners in extremely notorious, famous criminal cases in the UK.
I think probably most notably people have heard of him because of his relationship with Myra Hindley, who along with Ian Brady murdered a bunch of children tragically.
during the 1960s and Lord Longford was known for bringing compassion, I suppose, under a kind of Christian edict to people and believing in reform and transformation, even in the most egregious forms of criminality.
That was a tough one.
So Lord, yeah bloody hell, Lord Longford then, so that's a person that you encountered.
Well, I didn't encounter him, but he was at my school's open day, which was held at Wimbledon Channel.
So there was about 300 or 400 kids there.
So I heard him, and I knew who he was because of my dad, and I learned a few things about him.
Excuse me.
There was always a judgement, like, they ain't no good.
You know, the vicar, be careful of the pine liquor.
My dog used to get out and have sex with these doggies and drive him mad.
It was hilarious.
Because we run the football team in the street.
And it was funny, just to cut across to a different story.
I met a fella the other week, the other month, down at the Blind Beggar.
I'd done a podcast there.
And this geezer come up to me.
I'd never met him before.
And he went, do you know a fella called... I won't say who it was.
He went, do you know a fella called Neil So-and-so?
I said, yeah.
I hadn't seen this boy since I left New Malden at 16.
I used to run the football team in the road there.
And I said, how do you know him?
And he said, look, I've got something for you.
And he gave me two videos of me and my younger brother when I was 11 and my brother was six on our chopper bikes going down the road.
I thought, my God, down the road with the turning we lived in.
And I said to this guy who I was talking to, I said, did they miss us when we left?
He went, not really.
50-50.
And when we went to New Malden, blah blah.
But Lord Longfoot, that night after his visits to the Town Hall, we went over to Wimbledon station And it was bonfire night.
And we got this old bin, what was downstairs, set light to it on the station.
So I was at a good school, but all the naughty boys gravitated to me and I did to them.
We got arrested.
It did set the station alight, but it weren't clever what we'd done.
Fire engines.
So my headmaster, who really liked me, Mr Fisher, Later on he got nicked for embezzlement by a fella I think that's why he liked me.
But I couldn't maintain the ability to concentrate in school.
So I excelled at sport.
My mum used to change my school report from a D minus to a B plus because I'd get in trouble with the old man.
My siblings were very bright.
And so, it started early days for me.
Woolworths setting fire to Wimbledon station, getting in trouble with... The headmaster did not want me to be in trouble.
He really liked me.
But, like, if I used to go, go and get the cane and book him, he never used to cane me.
He used to go, go out, rub on your backside, and I'll sign that off cane.
He really liked me.
You know, blah.
And so, the school became a bit of a blur to me.
I couldn't, I couldn't get it.
Criminal activities.
My dad didn't teach me to be a criminal, but I became one.
It sounds like already sort of quite inevitable.
And even in the first part of this conversation, we've talked about famous places and monuments to this extraordinary and glamorous, peculiar period in British history.
Notably, the Blind Beggar has already been name checked, notorious mostly as the place where Jack the Hat McV... No, George Cornell.
We'll be talking about not only the extraordinary glamour that that culture appears to emanate, but also, in my opinion, the fact that somehow ordinary people sense that criminality is institutional, endemic and everywhere, permitted for a particular class of people, Permitted for global institutions.
Permitted for the dominant elite class.
Condemned among ordinary people.
So perhaps in all crime there is an inherent Robin Hood element because we recognise how the game is rigged and how the game has set up.
Nevertheless, for none of us, there is no solution to be found in the material world.
So ultimately, we'll be talking about the conversion and transition that Michael has experienced while talking also about his prison conversion experience.
One of the biggest drug smuggling busts in the history of these islands and how that went down.
But we won't be talking about any of that on YouTube.
If you're watching us there, click the link in the description.
Join us over on Rumble.
Consider becoming an Awakened one that we get exclusive video content every single week.
This week, we talk about Antarctica.
and the extraordinary mysteries around it.
We've also had amazing conversations with Bobby Kennedy this week,
Dave Martin, extraordinary educations on the kind of institutional crime
that I'm alluding to here while we talk about the types of crimes
that tend to, I suppose, put hairs on end in Hollywood and excite people across these islands.
Perhaps because we know that the real criminality is taking place elsewhere.
Click the link in the description.
See you over on Rumble.
Michael, so how do you transition from the kind of what I identify with of feeling like you don't fit in at school and minor misdemeanors, although I've never set fire myself, to a public railway station?
To the kind of crime that has come to define your life and indeed your biography, Sins of Fathers.
How is it you go from peripheral criminality to career criminality?
I suppose in particular I'm very interested in the smuggling enterprise that led to the biggest cannabis bust in the history of these islands and a pretty considerable sentence for both yourself and your father and that extraordinary detail that both you and your father served the time together I think in the same prison. I'd
love to hear about how your enterprise reached those proportions and the
consequences of it.
Okay, okay Russell, lovely.
I set it up quite nice, didn't I?
Laying the table, all nice.
It's really cool.
Laying the table, lovely.
For the starter, the main course.
Done a little starter there.
And the dessert.
Yeah, very much.
The aperitif as well, which is alright as well.
So I worked my way through, I suppose I'd done my apprenticeship.
And I was in a car chase once, where I wound up in a wheelchair.
I was with a kid who was wanted by the police.
It was high end police chase.
I went to prison a couple of times.
I used to handle stolen goods, but lovely antique furnishes.
So I was learning the trade.
I was getting my elbows sort of scratched and my knees scratched and learning.
And it was something that I didn't have to learn a lot about.
I was unnatural to it.
And so when my dad, one of his, you know, he was involved with the five families out in America.
Counterpipe was a very well-known sort of man.
He's passed away now, so it's not to talk about things I shouldn't be talking about.
There's a man called Joe Pyle.
And they became... They were drug smuggling into the UK, late 70s, early 80s.
Yeah.
Well, it really wasn't really well-known then.
And it was coming across Europe, and we got involved as kids, like...
We set up some potato pitches.
We used to sell potatoes on the side of the street and the cannabis used to be delivered there and picked up.
It was a little bit rough and ready but I don't think The police and all that were ready for it.
Because it wasn't a crime that they focused on.
It was armed robberies and all that.
So it was a new thing.
Come out of the hippie days, you know what I mean?
But it was a very lucrative business.
So my dad was proceeding in that.
I was learning my trade.
I got arrested with that guy I just mentioned to you.
I wasn't really at it then.
He was.
I was in a wheelchair.
I got bail.
He went on to do quite a long time in prison.
But it was the trendy thing then.
If you was wanted by the police, you went out and lived in Marbella.
Yeah, yeah, that's a big scene all of that.
Massive.
English people, expats.
Absolutely.
1983.
All tanned and that.
Sexy beast.
Ray Winston.
Tight trunks.
Lovely.
You got any wine?
Excuse me.
Have a little bit of your tea.
Thank you.
I've just got a bit of a lung thing at the moment.
Well, you've got cancer, haven't you?
At the moment I have, yeah.
That'll pass.
Absolutely.
God says, by his stripes I am healed.
By his stripes you are healed, Michael.
Amen, thank you.
So, when, yeah, so Marlborough, so I'm in 1984.
I've just had a big car chase, I've been in a wheelchair, get a little bit better, slip down to Marlborough, arrive there, I'm about, in 1985, 84, I was, er, so 58, 68, I was about 33.
Now what am I talking about?
I was younger than that.
I was 1958 to 68 to 78.
I was about 26, yeah.
26 years old.
This car chase obviously didn't end well if it put you in a wheelchair, I'm supposing, legitimately.
No, it didn't.
I went through, my mate went through the window screen being chased by cops.
They said I threw drugs out of the car, but it was all nonsense, yeah.
Of course.
My mate was wanting for something else.
It was guns and all sorts of crazy things involved.
At that time, the police's focus, as you say, was more like armed robbery and like, I suppose, the kind of coercion-oriented crime of racketeering and such, rather than what you've described as the relatively new markets around drugs that you say come out of the counter-cultural movement.
New markets created people wanting cannabis and ultimately and eventually other substances, I suppose.
At that point, That's a sort of a nascent new market and a new sort of realm.
So is it, I suppose, after you've, it sounds like, served a little sentence for whatever was related to that police chase, you've moved to Marbella.
Can you tell us why and what that period is defined by?
Well, I didn't move to Marbella.
I moved to Marbella because I was wanted by the police.
I see.
Right?
I never turned up at a court case.
But I had been arrested prior to that.
I'd been arrested for cocaine.
They busted my house.
But only little bits.
They were looking for something big and they found something small.
I was very smart with what we used to do.
We were clever.
We acted a bit dumb.
But the education that I had, once the old man knew that I was sort of up for it, The education that he gave me to be, shtomali, shut your mouth, don't talk on the phone, you know, be... All sorts of things that he taught me.
On this time, when I got a bowel, because I was in a wheelchair, and they knew it weren't really a lot to do with me, I got a bit of bowel, and I absconded to Marbella in 1984-85.
And when I arrived there, obviously, people knew my dad.
And he had a bit of a reputation.
He was doing his thing in London.
Yeah, with the Joe Paul turnout.
Look, I wouldn't be telling you these things, but it's all documented.
You've only got to Google it.
It was in the newspapers.
It's not a kiss and tell with me.
So, I was out in Marbella.
I started to mess about a little.
I mean, Marbella and Morocco ain't too far away, do you know what I mean?
It's a gateway to the cannabis trade.
I see.
So that was sort of where I got involved.
Not only on a little scale, but something tragic happened.
My younger brother, He was such a beautiful boy, Russell.
He didn't have what I had.
He didn't have the madness.
Thank God it missed him.
He had the beauty of my mother.
And he came out because my grandfather was dying, my mother's father.
He'd come out to be with me because my grandfather was extremely close to me.
We wound up on the cocaine.
We was out with Charlie Wilson, the great train robber.
All people like that.
Was it an enjoyable time, all of that?
place called Pinky's up in Portobadoo with all the chaps, one up on the trumpet on the cocaine.
Was it an enjoyable time all of that because I know that you're in recovery from substances
so I wonder what it was like actually, were there high times that were joyful, that it was
hedonistic and pleasurable, that it was working for you?
You keep making reference to the darkness a kind of which I suppose in one way you could look at
addiction, in another way you could look at something sort of deeper than that I suppose but like in
the...
This story is there like are we talking about in Marbella and leading up to this enterprise becoming criminally and financially significant talking about a part of your life that for the obvious transformation you've made and therefore obviously I guess look back at it with I don't know some regret or Was there, was it sort of, because for us outside of it, British people like me, that's a kind of a legendary scene with legendary characters.
Was it enjoyable?
In the same way people ask me, like with all of the drug taking and the womanising and all that kind of stuff, people, I have to sort of go, I suppose there were minutes where it was sort of like I felt very sort of beautiful or powerful or impressive or something.
I have a different kind of take on it now, but what was it like, sort of, for you in that?
Like, I think of crime as its own show business.
Like, they say politics is show business for ugly people, and I feel like, I don't know, crime is show business for odd people.
I don't know.
I don't know what I don't know what a perfect analogy is but as you remember at that time there was a lot of crossover wasn't it?
Like you mentioned like how the Krays were mixing with aristocrats and like famous people and Ronnie Knight there was a sort of a co-mingling of celebrity and crime and like when you talk about pinkies and like people going out and getting on it and smashing it up and everything with the edge of it being not people that have gone to stage school wearing like little tights and tippy-tapping about in ballet shoes but people that are carrying shooters And tooled up the whole thing to me in spite of, I know it's part of the conversion experience of like, oh, then we done this, then we done that and we was all on it.
That was wrong.
No, that was wrong.
Oh, I look back on that with great regret.
You know, it's sort of an interesting part of any story, I think.
So like, was it sort of joyful or did it somehow, what did it feel like to be on the inside of that little bit, mate?
I love cannabis.
I love cannabis.
Cocaine weren't my friend.
Cocaine had me early days.
I had a period I'll be a bit posh.
It's crack, but it was called freebass.
So I got into that a little bit.
Drinking I was sweet with.
Ecstasy I loved.
But that cocaine used to drive me to dirty sex.
I'm sorry.
I don't mean to be rude.
Not dirty women.
They were always beautiful women.
But it was the mindset.
It was the theatrical scene play.
And I used to get so high on that that I hated myself.
I hated myself.
But the addiction I started to realise, and I don't mean that rudely about beautiful, wonderful women.
I know that.
I don't mean it rudely.
But that sort of thing for me, I think I was shown early days that drugs, a level of, thank you Russell, the level of cocaine was a massive distortion.
It was distorted to the head, to the spirit.
And that night we used cocaine when we was out with Charlie Wilson and my brother.
And we went back to the apartment up near Lower Golf Course up behind the ball ring in Marbella.
And me and my brother had words and it was hard to argue with my brother.
He was a bit like yourself Russell, he had a right nice way about him without talking.
There was a niceness, there was a kindness there and I could see it in your eyes.
And I'm not massaging your ego, I'm telling you the truth.
That's one thing I've learned to do, is tell the truth.
I was just such a liar.
But I had to be.
My dad said, don't even tell no one your name!
So that night we had words, we was talking about my father because my father had met another lady.
And my mother was distorted, dad was dying, and this other lady was pregnant.
And it was difficult times, you know?
And we was arguing, we had an argument.
He left the flat, I went and got him by the ballroom, give him the motor of one of them old silly Pandas, like they was hired vehicles.
He went off to, it was a lot of different circumstances here, but he went off to Malaga airport, couldn't get on the aeroplane, come back, went underneath a lorry and it killed him stone dead.
And that was the news I was woken up to.
His girlfriend, who's a lovely lady, she's a famous artist actually today.
Can I plug her?
The Unskilled Worker.
It's great.
Her work's great.
What's her name again?
Unskilled Worker, she's called.
She's a very great artist.
I'm not just saying it's great art.
And very colourful, abstract, but it's lovely.
And so she was pregnant with my brother's son.
So she was three months pregnant.
I thought, again, the shame of the abuse as a child, the criminal activities.
And then my brother died, and I took... I blame myself.
And he died, and I had to go and see him.
It was awful.
It wasn't nice.
I had to go and see him.
Took him home.
I come back, got arrested.
Went on bail.
Got a... I went to prison this time, but instead of getting the eight or nine years what the other kid got, cos I was innocent, I really was, I got 18 months for being in the car.
That was it.
Come home, said I'd never do it again.
That was in the late 80s.
My brother had died.
I had three children by then with my Commonwealth wife.
We weren't getting on.
Drugs appeared again when I came out of full prison.
And I went back down to Spain, sort of the late 80s, and got at it again.
When you're working out of Spain, and you've mentioned this, the connection between Morocco and Marbella, how does this lead to this sort of incredible industrialized smuggling that ultimately leads to your arrest and significant And a significant prison sentence.
And what role do you imagine that the death of your brother plays in that?
Do you feel that the sort of sadness of that loss somehow, I suppose any one of them, any time anything like that happens it's a potential opportunity for review and for reckoning or sometimes we go sort of, it seems at least in your case, sort of deeper into the way of life that would ultimately have to end one way or another.
So could you tell us a bit about the impact of your brother's death but how you end up in, you know, the stories that lead to your arrest, mate?
Well, what I believe, yeah, I believe that we have parts of our, say, let's call it our soul, yeah, that As a heartbeat, it has a language.
It just doesn't sit there.
And it's a spiritual part of our being.
And I dirtied mine with the sex abuse on me.
How I acted out from that.
I wasn't in the moment ever.
I was always down the road or behind.
I had such an active mind.
I can imagine my siblings did, but theirs was bright.
Mine was mad.
It was like a full-on... It never stopped.
It was like a locomotive train.
So the consequences of my brother dying really, really messed me up.
And it enlargened...
The gaping wound that previous life circumstances have been inflicted on me plus the sins of the fathers I believe I was born with.
So it was the impregnation of my grandfather's sin.
It's biblical.
Yeah.
It's very biblical.
So I've had a big fight on my hands to beat that with the power of God.
So all of that, the excitement of being involved.
I took to it like duck to water being a criminal.
It was right up my street.
I loved it.
But I was never content with anything I had, only my children.
It's only my children.
So when I went back down to Spain, I was a broken vessel.
That was when I had the first dishonest relationship which hurt my mother of my children with a girlfriend that we knew, the mental illness, the broken The broken spirit, the broken soul, which was dirty.
I went down to Spain again in the late 80s.
One reason was to recover, because I'd caused absolute murders with my behaviour towards women.
And as much as Michael was likeable, the darkness was making him sort of an unsavoury character.
But where I was lively, I was very theatrical.
And people used to like... And I was a good money owner, right?
Money used to find me.
Al, what is this ingenuity that's required?
What's the difference between a successful drug smuggler and unsuccessful ones?
What's the difference between people that can participate in organisations that generate great revenue and those that fall at the first pitfalls?
What kind of relationships do you have to form?
What kind of decisions do you have to make?
What is the kind of opposition that you're facing?
And how did your skill set enable you to manoeuvre your way through what sounds like a lot of strategic difficulties?
Very difficult.
I think my dad opened a lot of doors.
But maybe where my brother and sister was intelligent, my intelligence might have been there.
I talked to it like ducks with water.
I was as game as you like, but a mixture of an opposite.
I was fearless but fearful.
I wasn't frightened of the obvious.
I was frightened of little mice and things like that.
But I wasn't frightened of the big giants.
It was a very confused dilemma.
Seriously, how I'm here to even speak properly, I had levels of mental illness that I think would have blown schizophrenia out of the water.
That's when I realised it wasn't the common illness of a cold, schizophrenia, which we call it.
I started to realise.
I used to call my grandfather the devil on two sticks.
And I started to become aware that there was something that was, I know this might sound a bit weird, was living in me that had a voice.
And it weren't me talking, it was something dark and I used to energize from it or feel bad about it.
So I'm juggling, right?
And I'm not being flash, I'm not a bad looking kid, so that helped me a little bit.
I had a notorious father, so that helped me a little bit.
But I turned up, I don't know why I was good at it, but I was.
I used to attract people.
People used to get on with me and they thought things... I didn't realise I was a broken vessel.
I was a broken vessel.
And I just got activated down in Spain again, met the right people, and smuggled a copious amount of...
Cannabis into the English quarters, in all they say it was about, it was more than five tonne.
More than five tonne.
How do you organise that?
Do you have to go to Morocco and talk to the people that are producing it?
How do you strategise the means for transportation?
How do you ensure that it's undertaken safely?
And who's sorting out the routes?
What kind of relationships you've got to have?
Right, so the relationship, I suppose my dad went before me.
So my apprenticeship was made a little bit easy.
So the environment... My dad was old school.
So there's people like, and he won't mind me mentioning it, he won't like me telling you this, he was 100 three days ago and he got a telegraph from the King.
No way!
Yeah, and I thought, God, you know, he got a telegraph.
And he was a big influence in my criminal life.
And he was Billy Hill's front man for the illegal gambling that went on.
It was called the Chemi Games.
In the 60s, there was Lord Lucan, Sir John Aspinall, Sir John Goldsmith, I believe, Annabelle's that people.
Yeah, James Goldsmith.
James Goldsmith.
And it was a crooked card game that they say they earned copious amounts of money from.
And Bobby was that, I was like that, non-violent, although he was a bit game.
So Bobby had a big influence for me down in Morocco because his wife lived there.
Yeah, and she was a pretty well-to-do lady.
Her father was a South African horse owner.
Bobby was friends.
It's all documented.
It's sweet.
Bobby's best friend was Richard Harris, the actor.
So Bobby's equilibrium in the crooked life and the famous life, the celebrity life, he handled it well.
And there's a story about Bobby.
So he was the introduction.
Again, doors was opened.
Because they was high echelon.
They was up there with the big boys.
And so people sought their own transport out.
We worked on the sea.
We had a fisherman down in Cornwall, Devon.
He's a great man.
I wouldn't say his name if you couldn't Google it, but his name was Dick Fishley.
And when he got arrested, we got arrested taking five ton off a boat down in a place called Bidderford.
I nicked the tape out of the call room.
I've got it indoors.
We gave you what it back.
It's a call to the customs.
I'm joking.
So as they're taking the drugs off the ship, there's a lot of them, on a sort of heist, a wench, this sort of crane thing.
Bang!
There's armed police there.
And all the lights went on.
There was loads of officers there, because there was 17 of us there.
I wasn't there at that particular time.
And they went, you know, whatever they say to arrest you.
You know, it's customs and exercise armed unit.
You're being arrested.
He went, you hear it on the video in the court.
He said, oh, it's OK.
It's only a bit of personal.
Five ton of it.
So that was essentially you with a kid head, you know what I mean?
And it was fishermen involved.
We entered the waters down in Devon.
We were grass.
Who's coming up with all them ideas of like, oh, what you do is use fishing trawlers.
We did.
That's a good idea.
It was a great idea.
How are you getting it?
What's the route?
Is it having to travel over land at any point, or is the whole thing done by sea?
They do travel over land, but on this situation, if we can focus on that, it was a sea situation.
So it never came from Morocco.
And again, this is all documented in newspapers and Google it, so I'm not talking out of school.
It comes from Pakistan.
and it was a lot of it right and it's called the mothership and then it feeds itself to other ships smaller ships we were one of those smaller ships where we took advantage of a situation because we had a way into England if you ain't got a way into England you can't go out of the dinghy and get it so we had a way into England But it was on it.
The police was on it.
It was a worldwide organisation with the Americans.
It was organised crime at a high level.
That weren't us, we were just involved with that.
So strategically, what's the word?
Strategically.
Strategically, thank you.
The way that was, what they'd done, they'd performed that out on the high seas, high level, It was our business.
They're proper people.
It's our government.
But we have areas of level of criminality that represent really what runs the world.
They're all crooked.
None of it's straight.
And they call us criminals.
And they're at it badly.
I'm sorry, but they are.
They can't lie straight in bed, Russell.
And we accept it.
We have to accept it.
You have to be part of the game.
Corruption at the highest level.
So there must be corruption at the highest level for this to perform.
Now you're going back 30 years.
Everyone's, most of the people involved were dead.
I was only a young boy.
So I can openly say it.
They can't nick no one and I've done nothing wrong.
They've only got to go on the Google and they see it for themselves.
But it was the changing of my life.
It was the changing of my life.
What happened when that shipment is seized?
What's that process like from moving through the judiciary to ending up in Exeter Prison, Michael?
I'm nixed.
With a guy they nick me if they nick everyone coming off the boat was you on the boat? No
No, Nick them and then well, yeah, I was I was in a farmhouse about seven mile away, but they knew where I was
So three of us went down Because we lost contact by the by the by
Yeah, it was a mobile, big old mobile walkie-talkie.
They nicked them all.
Yeah, when I told you earlier about the fishermen, they'd nicked them.
We go down near where they are, the armed cops, allergen lights, barsh, guns, night sights.
Michael, let me get out the car and put your hand above your head.
Now, the addicts in me, I did not give a monkeys.
So I'm frightened of mice, but I ain't frightened here.
And I'll get out and challenge it as if I'm some sort of... But I wasn't.
It weren't a roleplay.
I just didn't give a monkeys.
Weirdly, it's that mixture of the fearless, fearful character that had operated up to 34 years of his life, and it was tiring, Russell.
And I had to be fixed all the time, because this gaping hole needed either sex, In the wrong places.
Drugs.
Money.
And I had three children who I absolutely adored.
Wonderful women in my life.
But it was never enough.
I didn't do normal.
I didn't do natural.
I'd done madness throughout my life.
And I hated it.
And there was this glimmer of something, love and all that.
And when I got arrested, gun to the floor, I was very sort of angry.
I wasn't being taken easy.
And, um...
And then when he got me on the floor, he put a gun to my head or near my head.
He said, I've been looking for you.
I've been following you for 18 months, which I knew they had been.
It's quite, it's quite an in-depth story.
It's quite, there's a glamorous story down in my bed of all this as well.
Houses and cars and boats and women, whatever.
And excuse me, he said, a penny for your thoughts.
And I looked at him and a tear come out of my eye.
I don't think he could believe it.
And I said, I told him to F off.
And he said, a penny for your thoughts.
I said, my three children.
And I was heartbroken about my kids.
I wouldn't give them my name and address for two days.
It's all these mad fishermen.
They got all the puff.
They're all celebrating.
It's a big coup.
But they've strategically nicked everyone around the world over the last two days.
It was loads of it they nicked.
It was organised crime at the highest level.
Organised crime.
And I was part of it, this mad addict.
I sort of loved it, really, to be honest with you.
And I shouldn't have gone to Exeter.
I should have been a CA prisoner.
I went to Exeter.
And that's when the conversion took place.
Oh.
Samantha Fox was a friend of... Samantha Fox in the UK was like a glamour girl, she was a thing called page three girls.
In the 1980s, newspapers used to have, for no reason at all really, when you think about it she was mad now, a naked woman on the second page of the newspaper, front page, but there's a war in the Falklands, page three, look at this woman with no clothes on!
So how's Sam Fox involved?
My then wife, I'd since I'd left Tracy and the children who I absolutely adore.
I've got four children and eight lovely grandchildren and two lovely ex-wives.
So the girl I married down in Spain when I was living there, her father was a restaurateur owner.
They had some wonderful restaurants down in Spain.
So I became part of that scene as well.
And it was a celebrity restaurant.
They should all go in there, all the football players, all this and that.
You know, all sorts of people went in there, from actors...
To criminals.
And it was Marbella.
Me asked, it was like, it was lovely, you know, lights and bum, bum, bum.
Lovely people.
And the darkness was covered by the brightness of the light of Marbella.
Marbella had a sort of a name to, you know, women and fun and Arabs and money.
And it was lovely.
But there was a crime element there, which was pretty big.
Samantha Fox was Daniela's friend, and she became a Christian at Holy Trinity Brompton, the home of Alpha.
And God works in mysterious ways, and I was very open to the supernatural.
The supernatural didn't phase me, because I felt I was supernatural.
I didn't feel normal, I felt really bizarre, this opposite of me.
I didn't know who I was going to wake up in the morning with.
Whether it's fear or fearless.
Fact or fiction.
It was quite a nutty time.
And God changed that.
And they introduced me to Holy Trinity Brompton where there was a thing called Revival.
Don't want to get bogged down in that.
But God was on the move.
Now my God is not My God is a God of creation.
The God who spins the Earth around in space.
We're moving around at a thousand miles an hour.
How's that?
People don't fall off in Australia.
How's that?
I ain't got clues!
Marvellous stuff!
The birth of children.
And I think God's work is perfect.
We're not.
The Bible is a book of violence, wars.
But they look at Jesus as if he's got white sandals, a tambourine, ain't that?
Look at Jesus on the cross, powerful thing.
But my conversion in prison was when Sam introduced me to a guy called Nicky Gumbel, who's a wonderful church leader.
Alfred started.
There was many little bits and pieces that created this.
But everything was coincidental, as they say.
And I gave him a ring.
You can't get hold of him normally.
And he sent a team down to the prison.
And some wonderful things happened.
What happened in that room?
Can you tell me about that?
The conversion experience?
Because I understand, like, your father's there.
Can you tell me about who's in that room and what happens?
Just to tell us about that experience, please.
Right, okay.
Excuse me.
If I bunny too much, kick my leg.
So what happened was, the preparation of a marriage, The preparation of a party, there's always a preparation.
To drug smuggling, to a night out on the tiles, you prepare.
So there was a preparation with Daniela and Sam.
Daniela wanted me, she thought it was a miracle I was going to get out of prison somehow.
So she'd done everything she possibly could.
And I weren't really looking for Christ, to be honest.
Addict.
But I always prayed to get my cannabis home.
Everyone I used to talk to, I'd say, stand up to God.
Like, you lying?
Stand up to God.
It was my... Everyone knew I used to say it.
So God was not unfamiliar to me, because my grandmother, staunch Catholic, she had so many pictures of Jesus in her bedroom, I thought he was a relative.
They was everywhere.
And this, so there was a preparation for this.
And they come along, Revival is spirit-led.
All this word spirituality is like the oxygen that we breathe.
It's the child being born.
They're all miracles.
The Red Sea.
So I think we all, you know, we try to Put Jesus in a box because he doesn't fit the genre a lot.
Yeah, I can't be a Christian.
Let me change the only way out so spirituality Was a was a thing.
I think I was searching for this dirty soul.
These guys rock up to exit a prison It was 26 of us in their prison officers my dad and it might sound bizarre this but People falling off the bottom of the earth in Australia don't sound bizarre.
We accept it, all the stars in the sky, but the spirit of God was in that room.
People fell on their backs.
It was quite bizarre.
Men were screaming.
They weren't Christian men.
They were broken men doing long time in prison.
And I have to tell the truth about it.
And it wasn't, oh he was out of his nut, oh he was in prison.
It was none of that. It happened to happen.
What evoked it, these events of people crying out and falling on the floor?
What is the moment where that...
Prayer. They prayed.
Specifically?
They just prayed for the Holy Spirit.
Come, Holy Spirit.
Now, I got embarrassed about it.
I'm not embarrassed about talking about it no more.
Because I had the view of the flesh.
Oh, shut up.
Are you mad?
You're out.
You're in.
What is it?
Another addiction?
It wasn't.
It consumed me.
With peace.
Hope.
And I needed it.
I was mentally ill.
I feel like I've been stabbed a million times in the gut and I'd stabbed other people.
And people used to like me.
I was like Marmite.
Love him or hate him.
But I found something that could make me complete.
I didn't realise at the time, but it started a thing called Alpha Imprisons.
It went around the world.
I was a broken man.
I thought you had to be a right proper man to be a Christian.
You weren't allowed to do anything.
It's done like that.
The grace of God is patient and kind and he took me on this journey and I haven't been a good Christian as the world would see it.
But God says, no, my grace is sufficient and I messed up loads of times.
But he keeps pulling me back to life.
Since then, you've been going into prisons all around the world.
I suppose sharing your experience and encouraging other men in prison to consider this path.
How's that been?
Has it worked?
It's been great.
Because they love the story of the drug smuggling and the father and the people I knew.
But the truth of the matter is, this God has changed me.
It ain't the cancer.
It ain't the lovely children.
I love my grandchildren.
I've got the best grandchildren in the world.
Beautiful.
Thank God I didn't have no sons.
Just break the curse of the germ that the emit.
And the emits are lovely, but they were just full of something bad.
And so when I go in there now and I still say the same things, I'm quite good at it.
God's given me a mouth to speak.
But the truth of the matter is, I was a drug smuggler.
I was a womaniser.
I was a drug addict.
But what is really beautiful is I feel healed.
I haven't got a nutty head no more.
I haven't got someone who wants to be fixed.
I'm not impressed.
I lost everything.
Listen, I went from whatever I had to being homeless.
Not that I was on the streets, but I lost everything.
But I knew it was God.
I knew it was God.
Last miracle.
I was outside South Kensington Tube Station where I used to live.
I had a house there.
I'd lost everything.
I had no money to get home.
I could have phoned one of my kids or a friend, but I prayed outside South Kensington Tube Station.
I needed £4.80 to get home.
I walked down the Apples.
There was no one there.
Borrowing the ticket, Walden, and the Oyster card machines.
I kid you not.
No one there.
It's impossible at South King.
There was a noise on the Oyster card machine, Russell.
And I walked over to it.
God is my judge.
I needed £4.80 to get a fiver, fella.
I ain't got a clue where it come from.
There was no one standing there.
The noise came.
It might sound mad, but it happened.
And I felt God say, it's not what you want.
It's what you need.
And I needed healing.
I needed it to be peaceful.
I thought I needed money, wine, women and song.
And I was an addict and I was mad and all that.
And today I'm not.
Today I sit comfortably when they say I've got cancer.
I sit comfortably being celibate.
I sit comfortably with you.
You're a big market name, but you're a nice man.
You are.
Years ago, I'd have been looking at, oh, it's Russell Brand here.
Hold up a minute.
He's fantastic.
And it don't feel like that, Russell.
And they're blessings.
Because I'm at peace.
And I can acknowledge life on life terms.
There's a chance for us all, son.
God bless you for saying that, Michael.
Is there anything you want to read out of there or anything you want to point us to to wrap it up?
You've got your bins, mate.
I've got my bins, I have.
And while you're doing that, I'll say some of the themes that I really like looking into there.
Because I like looking at what we talk about on this show often is criminality in the kind of institutions that have global power.
Our conversation with Dave Martin this week talks about how the League of Nations was set up to regulate the opium trade.
He talks too about how the WHO ultimately demanded amnesty from arrest from its inception.
You've got to see that conversation.
With Dave Martin this Friday.
In our conversation with Bobby Kennedy this is a person that's now running for president who has some interesting ideas about why his uncle and father are no longer with us and how those murders were brought about.
So when we're talking about criminality we're talking about sort of sets of regulation and legislation And as Foucault would have it, who has the right to kill and who doesn't have the right to kill?
The state has the right to kill, other people don't.
And who is killable?
Some extraordinary questions.
I also like the theme that keeps emerging of there being a sort of a second ulterior presence, a different force that is available to us when we choose to access it or when we are brought towards it.
And with that, Michael, to bring us to conclusion, I'd love for you to read whatever verse you fancy reading.
I'll take the opportunity to let our audience know that you can become an Awakened one day.
You can have one month for free.
We can cancel at any time.
We do exclusive content every single week.
You can join us and pose questions to our guests.
Also join us for our book club and our meditation club.
You can support Michael's podcast, Gritty Nitty, which is taking a hiatus at the moment, but I believe there's some other stuff up, and his book, which he's mentioned several times, in which he details his story beautifully, Sins of the Fathers, is available now.
We'll put links to that in the chat.
What are you saying?
Right, sorry, it's in Jeremiah, I think it's 29 But I can't find it.
I'll have a quick look.
But what it says, and this is what God says, you're a sweet young man, aren't you?
Me, Russell?
No, you are a sweet young man.
No, I mean it.
You're a sweet young man.
I hope you don't mind, but I met your family just briefly.
Wow.
How lovely are they?
No, I mean it, mate.
I mean it.
You're a lovely wife and children.
I don't mean to be personal, but I think that's the test of a man.
How much his kids love him.
How much his wife loves him.
And how I've taken to you.
You're a cool guy, mate.
Thank you, Michael.
Support this kid.
I mean it.
Support it.
Thank you.
That's lovely of you to say.
Those without sin cast the first stone.
No one can do that, son.
No one can.
So in here, in Jeremiah 29, and I think it's 11 or 14 or 17, but Jeremiah, and I will get it for you, God says this to all of us.
He says, I have a plan.
I have a plan to prosper you and not to harm you.
A plan to give you hope for the future.
And it's the Word of God that He means.
Prosperity is not money.
It can be money.
But it's to prosper our soul, our mind, our sight, our hearing, our love.
So love is an action.
It's what we do in love.
It's not what we do in lust or greed or pride.
And it's Jeremiah 20.
Can I look for it and tell you what it is afterwards?
Yeah.
Because you can check it out yourself.
But I just want to say it's been a right pleasure, son.
Oh, you're beautiful.
Thank you, Michael.
Thanks for inviting me.
I've really enjoyed it.
Beautiful to spend some time together.
Support this kid.
God bless you, Michael.
Thank you very much for joining us for this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Remember, tomorrow we'll be talking to Bobby Kennedy and the day after that, Dave Martin.
Fantastic conversations that in various ways help you understand the significance of the awakening spirit within you and within all of us and the possibility for change and the ability that we all share to unify and oppose global corruption together.
We will be back tomorrow, not with more of the same, but with more of the different.
Until then, if you can, stay free.
Man, he's switchin'.
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