Throughout the late 70s, 80s and the best part of the 90s, a group of Mancunian and Salfordian thieves, football thugs and street urchins known as the Wide Awake Firm (WAF) proved to be a constant source of irritation to Interpol. This ragtag bunch of self-confessed kleptomaniacs committed crimes all over the world, despite being on the organisation s list of undesirables. Colin Beaner Blaney was one of the crew s most active villains and a member of a criminal network of Manchester United hooligans known as the Inter City Jibbers. His time with the WAF and ICJ saw him smuggling cocaine into Britain from mainland Europe, being involved in violent feuds with rival gangs of crooks, and carrying out daring jewellery thefts as far afield as Taiwan and South Korea. Colin Blaney s first book Grafters, published in 2004, detailed some of his exploits abroad. An autobiographical true-crime memoir, it quickly gained a cult following, with Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown listing it among his inspirations and the Salford Star newspaper describing it as an iconic scally book . It became a bestseller, and resulted in appearances by the author in a host of documentaries, including Danny Dyer s The Real Football Factories, Sky One s Toughest Pubs in Britain, Channel 4 s Secrets of the Pickpockets, Channel 5 s documentaries about pickpocketing and shoplifting and Cass Pennant s award-winning film Casuals. Spurred on by the overwhelmingly positive response, he has now written a book consisting of material that he had originally deemed too risky to include in Grafters. This shocking new account from the inner core of the Inter City Jibbers details four attempted jailbreaks, deals with the author s marriage inside a German jail to a former staff member, and tells of run-ins with gun-wielding foreign thugs. It also describes Blaney s associates experiences in various jails, including the gang rape of a WAF member in a Pakistani prison, the story of a smuggler who was banged up in a hellish American penitentiary and the tale of an ICJ member who was locked up in a Yakuza-filled Japanese prison. Above all, the book is an account of twenty-five years of life as an undesirable, stealing anything that wasn t nailed down.