Villain and Proud

Trigger warning- references to sex work and addiction.

They don't have a name for what I am. I don't quite fit in to any of their categories. I'm not quite a psychopath, not quite associate path. I don't quite have Borderline personality disorder, I'm not quite across the line with paranoid schizophrenia. I have traits of all the above without quite qualifying to be labelled as any of them. I am a unique case, and alas, remain unnamed. This seems to bother these learned men. If they are ancient magicians who can only wield power over something once they know it's true name. Well I feel charitable today; a rarity indeed. I will adopt a name for them. It's an old name, supposed to be derisive. But like the Methodists, the impressionists the punks, I will wear their derisive label gladly. I am a villain.

And given that I accept the designation villain, this does render questions about my guilt rather moot. I am guilty of all of that I am accused of. This is the truth. But it is only part of the truth and I would have the rest be known.

In popular culture heroes often have tragic backstories furnished with loss and difficulty. Toughened by these difficulties they develop great resolve and a strong moral compass. The villain by contrast, is often some narcissist whose ambition has been thwarted, or ego bruised. But in my experience those early difficulties are all too often the making of a villain. It does give you resolve, I'll give them that, but it's also causes your moral compass to lose its bearings.

You might not guess it from my rather florid prose style, but my beginnings were very humble. I'd say I was born on the wrong side of the tracks, but the tracks had been pulled up and sold for scrap. Public transport having died out due to draconian local government spending cuts.

On I was born the son of a prostitute in a notorious brothel. My mother, and she was my mother in the biological sense only, was a cruel and ignorant woman, beaten down in body and spirit by the life she lived. She had a litany of addictions, and by the time she emerged long enough from one of her drug-induced hazes to realize she was pregnant she was too far gone to abort me. My father was one of her johns- take your pick.

Any cruelties that were visited on my mother she transmitted to me. I spent most of my early years limping and tiger striped with bruises.

One night I interrupted her with one of her johns, I heard groaning and murmuring from her room, and thought he was hurting her. He stormed out without paying and I went without food for four days.

It was around this time that my mother's unique parenting style reached the ears of the authorities. I was taking into care by two police officers under social worker. My mother didn't even get out of bed.

I didn't see her again until twelve years later when she came to see me during one of my earlier prison stints. Time passes differently for addicts. What was twelve years for me seemed thirty for her. Bowed almost double by the weight of her ignorance, her hands contorted with arthritis, she only had a few strands of tenacious hair left on her head. She attempted a smile when she saw me, her missing middle teeth made it look like a seven-ten split.

She prattled on for a while about mistakes and the shortness of life. We all turn into two-bit philosophers in the end.

'Leukemia,' she said. 'It's just a matter of months. But I want to get to know you in my last days.'

'Leukemia,' I said. ' That poor cancer, having to grow on you.'

This was one of many stints as a guest of the state. One might say I'm a connoisseur of the prison system. I could write the definitive guide. They say prisons are often like universities for criminals. That was certainly the case for me. I dropped out of the formal school system in my early teens. The path of villainy cares not for pieces of paper. Unless of course they are green. But to be a success you do need skills and knowledge, and prisons can be an ideal training ground.

I learned dirty boxing from an old Jamaican with one eye and more scars than a self-harm support group. At one stage he was a world champion but addiction had reduced him to petty theft and fraud. He sold his hard-won skills for tiny fragments of crack and PCP. He was at once one of the most pathetic and deadly men I ever knew.

I learnt a bastardized form of judo from an old master who had been caught interfering with his students. Child predators are usually easy and popular targets. He was neither. At least not twice.

I learnt how to use a knife from a psychotic old Gaucho who could slit your throat so cleanly you wouldn't know what happened until the blood filled your mouth.

I learnt infiltration and safe-breaking from an old Frenchman considered a myth in his homeland. His escapology skills were such that he was only in prison to network and meet new contacts. Once he finished training me he duly escaped. We were to collaborate many times later in my career.

I learned how to think tactically and lead- that is to say manipulate- from a Serbian colonel. He presided over the murder of dozens of civilians during the Yugoslavian War. Excellent chess player though.

And of course there was the prison library. The only window on the outside world without bars. I used the library to expand upon and fortify the knowledge my mentors had imparted to me. And finally there was also the obligatory convict fitness regime. This is how I became a formidable a villain as you would ever have the misfortune to encounter. The prison stints soon stopped happening; I became too good to catch.

There have been so many heists. Daring, audacious, brilliant. So many superlatives used by the press to describe escapades that took less than an hour to plan. Child's play. The key to a conventional heist isn't the theft itself, that is always much the same- where a disguise that makes you look generic and able to blend in to the area surrounding the bank, neutralize the security and the cameras, keep the hostages in a single place where they are easy to manage, keep violence to an absolute minimum. The key really is the escape. And it's not a matter of hiring a flashy driver with the powerful car. That's just Hollywood nonsense. No driver can outrun a helicopter with a heat camera. Move slowly and steadily in ways they won't expect. And if you can, create a diversion. For example, there was a notorious local speed-demon known for drag racing in public places. I sent him a note, apparently from a hated rival, challenging him to a dead-start race from outside the bank. A dead-start race is where you suddenly take off from a normal parked position at an agreed upon time and race to an agreed upon destination. His uncouth competitiveness drew the police into a pursuit. While he was being forced to the ground with his hands-cuffed behind his back, and unassuming man in a cheap suit carrying a large duffel bag bordered a city bus . And while the speed-demon was making a tearful phone call to his mother from a nearby police station, that unassuming man and his duffel bag were long gone.

What's my most famous theft, my Magnum opus, was the Janian Diamond heist. Said to house the soul of an ancient sorcerer, said to imbue its wearer with fantastic powers, said to grant its owner the right to rule the ancient kingdom of Janin. Said is one thing-the diamond is known to weigh 108 carats and be worth something in the region of 150 million dollars. You can keep the keys to the kingdom. Besides, the region where Janin once stood is now in the thrall of a Maoist insurrection. I find it unlikely that they would lay down their arms and their grievances just because someone with some fancy jewelry turned up.

Of course such a jewel could not be sold on, but that didn't matter. My villainy had made me independently wealthy a long time before this. By then it was just about the challenge.

The diamond was owned by a Saudi Arabian sheikh- don't they seem to own everything these days? And this particular sheikh was, well, a moron to put it mildly. The product of a lifetime of mindless and vulgar privilege, he'd gotten everything he'd ever wanted since he was a child. Having never encountered any adversity, such people never develop any will. They develop vast, pulsating egos, which can sometimes be mistaken for wills. But true willpower cannot be manipulated, only overcome with greater willpower. An ego however, vanity of the kind the sheikh had in even greater abundance than money, that is easier to manipulate than an algebraic expression.

Perhaps the one area where the sheikh had the slightest scintilla of self-awareness was in his sense of spiritual poverty. He was always pursuing one fad or another to try to remedy this. In other words, a vulnerability. I worked my way into his inner-circle by posing as a spiritual guru. It took me two weeks to completely win his trust.

'You must display the diamond to the public,' I said to him. The hemp clothing and dread-lock wig were very uncomfortable. Let it never be set that I didn't suffer for my art. 'The diamond is an innately spiritual item. It was never intended to be enjoyed by just one person. It will be good karma to share its beauty with the public.' Ostensibly a Muslim the sheikh none the less had a strong belief in karma.

I also convinced him, that I, as his guru, was the only one qualified to ensure the diamond's security. From here it was easy to switch the diamond with a decoy. As already stated, a diamond like this cannot be sold on the black market, or a market of any color for that matter. But what's the point in stealing treasure if no one will ever know? So I planted a small device into the decoy that admitted a very specific sound frequency that shattered it right at the moment of its unveiling. Right in front of the sheikh's tear-stung eyes.

So what becomes of old villains in the end? You'd like for me to tell you that I was taken down by some hero with similar skills to my own but with the opposite set of morals. That's more Hollywood stuff I'm afraid.

If a villain isn't eventually captured by the bureaucracy of a large police force, then they are usually taken down by another villain instead of a hero. A rival or a younger usurper usually.

In my case it was white-collar crime. No more need for brilliant schemes and daring raids. Immense amounts of money can be redirected with the flick of a key or the click of a mouse. And this sort of criminality is sanctioned by governments in the form of Wall Street, the City of London, and other such dens of iniquity. The kind of villain who operates in such places doesn't even know they are a villain, and feels perfectly justified in what they do. A great man once said that to live outside the law you must be honest. I'd add to that that you must be honest with yourself. There's not much fun in being a villain in the world that these people have made. So I've been retired for some time, but I look upon these new villains and think my old skills could be deployed against them. Perhaps it's time to come out of retirement, I'll never be a hero, but perhaps I could be a sort of anti-villain. You know what they say, you can't keep a bad boy down.