AYITEY POWERS IN BABYLON PART 1

                                          

I saw Ayitey Powers or someone of remarkable resemblance to him the other day. It must have been the real Powers because there are not many halfway-bald, peroxide-dyed heads in my neck of the woods (think a fusion of El Hadj Diouf and Solomon Sampah).

The sight of the flamboyant, blonde bombshell – oops, I meant bomber - brought back some interesting memories of Mr. Powers’ time in Edmonton, London a couple of years ago.

Once upon a time, I am so tempted to add: time, time. If you’re a Ghanaian reader, you’d understand the preceding statement. If you’re not, then let’s just carry on. Anyway, twice upon a time, in a far away land called Edmonton there lived a Ghanaian boxer of international repute called Ayitey Powers.

While most Ghanaians in Edmonton were bursting their balls working 9AM-5PM or 6PM-2AM or both or round the clock, Mr Powers had just been licensed to box in the UK, so he was far better off. He could chill and have two fights in a year and still be OK. I mean, taking punch after hefty punch from burly boxers is barely a wet dream but anything could beat slaving your life away at Sainsbury’s, TESCO, dish-washing or Footlocker-ing, right? Right.

Wrong. On second thought I wouldn’t envy the fame and money of Floyd Mayweather, not even good-naturedly (if there ever was such a thing as good-natured envy), considering the number of fists that he has had to eat so how much less Ayitey Powers?

But honest to God, we were all thrilled for him because obtaining a license to break people's faces in legally in the UK was no mean accomplishment. It still isn't.

The story continues: Mr Powers had (and still has) charisma, so everybody liked him. People who did not know who he was , wanted to know because they could tell he was a diamond in the rough or in the rock or in the dirt. Or whatever the expression is. He was like a people magnet in the flesh.

It so happens that around the same time Ayitey was busy charming the uncharmable, a new breed of criminals had been unleashed onto Auntie Lizzy Windsor’s country. They were a minority of Eastern Europeans migrants “running things” long before Poland and co. had been officially accepted into the E.U.  These mobsters were mostly Romanians or Albanians or Serbians or Poles, or Gypsies anyway. Nobody could tell the difference, to be honest. You had a better chance telling South Koreans from North Koreans, Japanese from Chinese etc. (I am not racist by the way, sometimes I can’t tell Ghanaians from bloody Nigerians.)

Their rackets included fake tarot card-reading, selling “Rolex” watches that turned people’s wrist green in about two hours flat, getting corny belly dancers into big-time nightclubs for exorbitant fees, human trafficking, slavery (recruiting people to work in warehouses, getting them to beg for change etc, etc bloody etc . But, the scam that we would be concentrating on today, boys and girls, for the purpose of our story will be what I call the “Electronic Magic Switch” swindle.

The Modus Operandi of the douche bags that oprated the E.M.S is/was simple and we will get to that in a bit. What is the correlation between these scums and our hero, Ayitey Powers? Just read on, innit?

One cold, dreary Spring morning, Mr Powers was minding his own business, just window-shopping, day-dreaming about what he was going to buy when his big fight eventually came. As he bustled about in a confident swagger, I could not for the life of me understand how these men picked him out but they did. And Powers does not strike me as a particularly dense-looking person. So when the Eastern European gentleman approached him and offered to sell him a fresh, top-of-the-range, ultra-modern laptop I was surprised that my boxing hero seemed interested…..

To be continued…