Outlaw: Learning lessons the hard way as Britain’s most wanted man

Ray Bishop takes you to the darkest extremes of human behaviour- a world of gangster crime, armed robbery, copious drug use and compulsive, high-stakes gambling. Against the odds, he lived to tell the tale.

Ray Bishop was on the run, skulking in a dealer’s house in north London, when an image of his face flashed up on the TV, accompanied by a public warning. The assembled company were aghast, and Ray felt sick at what he saw. How had he become Britain’s most wanted man?

Outlaw is Ray’s brutal, shocking, adrenaline-soaked autobiography. The narrative starts on a council estate in South East London, where he and his friends were regularly brutalised by the police. He got involved in petty crime, and was despatched to various notoriously violent youth-detention centres, all of which served to criminalise him, and others like him, much further. He graduated with flying colours to a career in London’s underworld as an armed robber, a drug smuggler and a people trafficker, developing a serious addiction to cocaine and heroin along the way.

Ray eventually wore himself out, and enrolled in a rigorous rehabilitation programme which provided him with a path to redemption. In 2010 he realised his childhood dream of becoming British Middleweight Boxing Champion. A truly inspirational turnaround, and a riveting life story.