“Lightning” Lee Murray has lived an incredible — and incredibly erratic — life.
This article appeared in the August 25, 2008 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
By Shaun Assael
ESPN The Magazine
Which of the following is true about “Lightning” Lee Murray?
(a) He’s the meanest MMA fighter ever to walk the streets of London.
(b) He’s suspected of masterminding the biggest bank heist in history.
(c) Although stuck in a Moroccan prison, he’s a bit tricky to pin down.
Actually, it’s (d) — all of the above.
If the stories are true, Lee Murray is the meanest middleweight ever to come out of the projects of South London. His friends love to talk about the time he single-handedly fought nine bouncers at a disco. Left ‘em sleeping like babies in the doorway, says one. Or the night he hit MMA tough Tito Ortiz with five head shots that put him flat on his back. Then punted him in the head, adds one witness. And they’ll go on about the night he died not once but three times in an emergency room after being stabbed in the chest.
But if Lightning Lee’s legends often sound far too fantastic to be true, there’s one story that British authorities claim is beyond dispute: On a cold February night in 2006, seven masked gunmen raided a high-security bank warehouse outside London and made off with the greatest criminal cash haul in history, more than $100 million. Police say Murray was the mastermind, but by the time they could link him to the theft, he was living the posh life in Morocco.
Nevermind that Murray, 30, now sits in a Moroccan prison cell while authorities weigh a British request for extradition.
In London’s underground, he’s a hero. The problem — for me, anyway — is that he’s a reclusive hero who won’t speak to the press. Which means I have to fly to London to learn how a street thug turned MMA fighter gets accused of being the world’s biggest bank robber. Along the way, yet another improbable tale develops, involving me: Every time I approach someone who knows Murray, he seems to have reached them first, having phoned from his prison cell, 1,000 miles away. He thinks a movie about his life would be big, says one of his cronies. Murray, a fan of American mob movies, apparently wants to shape the script. In interview after interview, I arrive to find Murray has already dictated the outcome. When I ask one member of his crew — a scruffy tough who won’t stop griping about women — if he’ll connect me with Murray’s wife, I’m told that Lee says the women are off-limits.
Variations on this theme occur repeatedly. It’s exhausting, being messed with like that. So when I meet Mark “The Beast” Epstein, a scowling British cage fighter and Murray confidant, at a kebab joint on my last night in London, I cut to the chase, forgetting he could snap my neck. I need to speak to him, I say — now. Surprisingly, Epstein calls Morocco. But after some murmuring, he delivers bad news: Lee isn’t ready to talk. But he says you can ask one question. I freeze. What question do you ask one of the world’s most wanted men?
Murray was raised in the Barnfield housing projects in southeast London, where Somali kids ride their bikes with bandanas covering their faces. They’re the law now. But back in the 1990s, the Barney Boys ran these streets. There were loads of fistfights, knife attacks, you name it, says Epstein, the gangs onetime leader, who says he once shot a man in the face over 200 kilos of coke.
Midway through a twilight tour of the alleys where the Barney Boys used to hang, Epstein disappears into a beat-up apartment. After some shouting on the third floor, he appears, clutching a wiry old man. It’s Lee’s father, Brahim Lamrani. When Epstein says we want to talk about his son, Lamrani wails, “My boy! Oh, my boy!” Maybe it’s his Moroccan accent or the fact that his upper lip flaps over his lower one, but the conversation ends there. Murray started hanging with the Barney Boys in the mid-1990s. Epstein remembers Murray as a feral little thing, always chased by the police. The kid devoured books about U.S. mobsters, especially John Gotti. Soon Epstein began refereeing Murray’s fights. “It was MMA on the streets,” he says. :I never saw Lee lose.” When Epstein went to prison in 1997 for selling heroin and crack (he’s since turned his life around), Murray became one of the gang’s leaders. He also discovered a sport that had as few rules as he did.
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