Born in Wood Green,North London in the early Sixties, it soon become apparent that he would not be able to survive on either sporting prowess or his good looks alone to get on in life. Mainly, no directly, as a result of him having neither.
Teachers and fellow pupils would remember David as 'a quiet shy boy' or 'the sort that keeps his head down and gets on with it' or even in some cases 'a good looking athletic lad, always combing his Afro hair'. These descriptions and many others covered up the fact that in the main, no one had a clue who he was, due to his attending the school only slightly more than the nit nurse.
They say 'the Devil makes work for idle hands' but in Davids case it was his Mother that would soon find something for him to do as he was once again home due to a 'teachers strike' or a 'bomb scare'. Indeed, if word of these bomb threats were true, Alexandra Park School in North London was slightly more precarious to visit than The Falls Road district of Belfast.
It was while trying to avoid both his Mother and the school authorities that he decided that the library would make a good place to lie low, it being one of the few places his teachers would never visit, due to it having books without pictures.
Friday at the library reading the NME and Sounds soon turned into Monday to Thursday as well, and while trying to blend in with the old age pensioners and dole heads, he perfected both his coughing and scrounging abilities, one of which would help him as he made his way in later life. And as he didn't make it as a Throat Specialist you will realise it was the latter.
It was while idling away 'the best years of your life' that he really started to devour books, sometimes reading two in a day. Anything with a good cover was generally the choice, although The Omen, Jaws and then James Herbert were recommendations he took on board. Reading 'The Godfather' started a lifetime fasination with 'The Five Families of New York'and he was soon searching for biographies and text books that would fill in the blanks about American and British crime families.
Once he left school he had a few 'real jobs' but realised that he would have to use his own gift of the gab and sales skills to make anything other than 'survival' money.
It was these jobs; market trader, courier,pirate video salesman,Perfume retailer (if it says it's Chanel then it is bloody Chanel) and finally ticket tout, interspersed with many other schemes and dreams that formed the characters and scams used in his books. Some of the names have been changed to protect the guilty, but he has known and worked with them all.
Now living in Braintree in Essex,he entered the world of Finance in 2001 when he qualified as a Mortgage Consultant and watched from within as the financial markets came crashing down in 2007.
His first book, The 3 Card Trick, was published in November 2012 and will be followed by The Rise of The Family in early March 2013.
