What does a football hooligan firm do outside football? In the case of Mark Chester and the infamous Stoke City Naughty Forty, the answer was: live off their wits and burn the candle at both ends. Chester left Stoke in the mid-Eighties in search of something more than the buzz of terrace violence.
He lived in North Africa with a pickpocket gang called The Hawks and dealt hash and coke in the Spanish coastal resorts, fighting off rival Moroccan dealers. After returning to London as a down-and-out - "to strip myself bare" - he took off again for Benidorm and the start of the rave scene.
Soon the Stoke boys had teamed up with the 6.57 Crew from Portsmouth to run Ecstasy rackets, driving pills in from Holland hidden in the tanks of motorbikes and clashing with international organised crime bosses. The Nineties saw Chester in California, enjoying riotous road trips with prostitutes and taking jaunts to watch the England football team abroad, with the inevitable carnage that ensued.
'Sex, Drugs And Football Thugs' is part travelogue, part confessional, and by turns harrowing and hilarious.
He lived in North Africa with a pickpocket gang called The Hawks and dealt hash and coke in the Spanish coastal resorts, fighting off rival Moroccan dealers. After returning to London as a down-and-out - "to strip myself bare" - he took off again for Benidorm and the start of the rave scene.
Soon the Stoke boys had teamed up with the 6.57 Crew from Portsmouth to run Ecstasy rackets, driving pills in from Holland hidden in the tanks of motorbikes and clashing with international organised crime bosses. The Nineties saw Chester in California, enjoying riotous road trips with prostitutes and taking jaunts to watch the England football team abroad, with the inevitable carnage that ensued.
'Sex, Drugs And Football Thugs' is part travelogue, part confessional, and by turns harrowing and hilarious.
