'Dog' had told me to meet him by the betting shop. It was grey. A carpet of people swept over Whitechapel. They swarmed over its steps, past the Chinese selling their fake DVDs, the Albanian cigarette smugglers, the Cockney stallholders who now swore in Bengali as fluent as their East End patois.

Then I saw him. Sauntering, cocky, smiling, his black shades Michael Jackson circa 'Beat It'.

"Yo, s'up bruv?"

"Asalaam Aleikoum, habibi," I replied.

Here he was: Rasul’s former worker Dog, or “MC Dogz” as he called himself – proud that he could serve you up whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted it, plated perfectly for the ghetto.

"Why you speakin' Arab for man?" he mocked. "You ain't even Muslim". He sucked through his teeth, disrespectfully.

I told him I enjoyed it. That he could lecture me about halal and haram when he himself had stopped sinning. Like Rasul, Dog reverted (to Islam) inside, sent down on the same charges. Like Rasul he was now out.

“Do you have a problem with that?”

"Nah .. s'just stoopid innit," he said. He looked at me with contempt. Or perhaps eagerness.

"You got it?" 

His voice was demanding. A child-like eagerness flicked behind his thin face and he hunched his shoulders through the windcheater. I nodded. We strode off, taking a winding course through the peoples of Banglatown, as we went to buy him his “wrap”.

I watched as he walked straight into the betting shop near Whitechapel tube station. A couple of minutes later he was out, holding a small package in a tiny piece of plastic, and we were off down a side street.

“Dealers hang out in a betting shop...?” I was incredulous.

“Yeah, perfect innit? It’s like, their office bruv.”

We sat in the back of a car as he unfurled then carefully tapped out the “brown” and prepared the foil. Dog had reverted – but back to drugs, not Islam it seemed. Within moments a flame flared and he was holding the tin foil, then inhaling deeply from the thick, crisp smoke. His eyes fluttered. The finger tips of his small hands danced across his lap, mapping out some unseen land. The acrid scent burned the back of my nose and I felt it too: The Dragon.

Not long after I met Dog, ‘Mo’ crossed my path. A handsome, intense young man, he’d handled the longest sentence of the crew: seven years for his role in supplying heroin and crack on the streets of the Endz. Dog laughed and said Mo had been foolish enough to write all his deals down, ensuring his downfall. He always seemed angry whenever we met.

"I bunked off school, then I started smokin drugs, sellin drugs, then I went to prison and I came out about a year ago... that's my story,” he growled, when I first asked about his life. Like his friend and former rival, Rasul, with whom he’d once fought a crazy war, Islam had entered his life in jail.

Yet he seemed most animated whenever we discussed the past: the fast life of cash and women that came with the easy money that drugs could supply to these Bengali soldiers.

"I used to hang 'aat with prostitutes, they were my bitches, we used to smoke drugs together. I can’t stand ‘em now.” He told me how he and his friends would wait "for like some victim to come, a punter, then we'd all rush 'im and get 'is money. That's when Vallance Road was hot: ‘hos, gangs, drugs."

Again, I would meet Mo – who renamed himself to the more Islamic-sounding 'Abu Da'ud' – during my trips to meet the old gang members. We broke fast together during Ramadan, eating the succulent dates and pieces of sweetcorn, washed down with water, that reminded the faithful of how their Prophet had done so 1400 years before. I was surprised when he told me that he too had joined BLYDA [the Brick Lane Youth Development Association]; he was a mentor to gang members but was finding life difficult.

We walked out into the playground surrounding the centre. Fat drops of rain begin to fall. Mo’s shoulders sank. “Going straight is hard. ... It’s the money man. Don’t get me wrong: being a mentor has given me new direction. But it’s so annoying, so frustrating,” he lamented. “The kids just won’t listen. Naw man, for real! They don’t.”

Rasul had told me that they both worked hard to steer the youngsters in their area away from drugs and crime. “I listen to them,” he said, with an edge of importance. “They’ve got no-one they can listen to. I use the experience I’ve gained growing up. Just to let them know they don’t have to go down the wrong track. I had to learn the hard way. There was no-one like this around.”

It was only much later I had learned they had fought a war together. These brothers of the Umma had once been pimps. “Yeah, y’know Mo, he did a ‘hit’ on my house,” admitted Rasul when I asked about it.

They had kidnapped each others’ workers. Mo had tortured one of Rasul’s people for several days. The guy jumped out of a second floor window to escape. “He hobbled home,” laughed Mo when telling me about it. “The flat was covered in blood.” He spoke in the same casual manner about violence I had come to associate with the neo-Nazi gangs and football hooligans I had once investigated for my book, Homeland.

The last time I saw him he was smoking a shisha pipe in one of the halal Islamic cafés that have sprung up in the Endz. He was with another young man out on probation. Together they ripped into the politicians now making the East End their battleground. They seemed to hate George Galloway, who had made Muslims his friend, more than most: "He's like you, man,” sneered Mo. “He's one of you, a replica of one of you! An old version with a cigar, yeah?"

The police remained the enemy. And he wanted, he said, to wipe out everyone that “came in the way” of Muslims.

“That's what I want to do bruv! These people need to be taught a lesson!"

***

Nick Ryan ©2009 extracted from forthcoming book