Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (20 page)

The prison cook would bake cakes for our friends’ birthdays. The friend would come on a visit and the cook would come out to the table with his white chef’s jacket and hat on, wish the person a happy birthday, and give them a beautiful cake with lit candles for the visitor to blow out.

Whatever my Chris wanted to do, the authorities let him do. They never bothered him. He had other contacts in the kitchen who sent him down tins of corned beef and fruit.

Many of the country’s most notorious criminals were turning up in Gartree, and the more there were, the more potentially explosive the situation became. Accordingly, the authorities grew very cautious and the system very lax: ‘Just leave them alone and let them get on with it.’ A blind eye would be turned to a lot of the goings-on. It was so cushy, it got boring. And of course it had to go up in the end – but in the meantime our lives ran very happily.

We managed to get VIP treatment a lot of the time in a lot of the prisons. Rarely in my prison career did the screws give me any hassle; it was me who gave them the hassle. If they tried to nick something off you, like privileges, you’d nick something back off them.

Generally, wherever we went – and by ‘we’, I mean the Richardsons, the Great Train Robbers, the Wembley Bank Robbers and us – we were guaranteed an easy ride. The Governors and screws knew which men to look after, and if we were happy then we’d be keeping the rest of the prison in line, because of our standing amongst the other cons. This was confirmed by a prison Governor called Lakes, who was in charge of Gartree in the
mid-seventies
; Lakes had a Greek relative who knew my Dad.

One day, when Chris and I were on a visit with our Dad, Lakes came over to be introduced to him. By this time we’d been in Gartree for three years, a long time, and Chris wanted to know why.

Lakes said, ‘We don’t want our prison falling into the wrong hands.’ He had the IRA in there, and a lot of dangerous men doing big sentences. He wanted to have a London gang in control, keeping a bit of peace.

But even when things were running smoothly, something could suddenly come along to upset the apple cart. How
do
you keep a con happy? You don’t. I’ve heard it said by everyone from the Governors to the lowest screws – you could put the cons in a hotel, give them a steak every night of the week, and if you locked the door they’d still find something to complain about. Lock a man up and he’s going to start rebelling; he’s going to start looking for a weakness in the system. But there’s going to be much less trouble if life is made as easy as possible.

The prison authorities’ priority was to contain us. Controlling us was a lesser consideration. As long as we weren’t escaping, they were prepared to put up with anything. You could smash a prison up, and they could rebuild it. You could tear up all the prisons you wanted. They could afford to lose a prison now and again, but they couldn’t afford to lose the people in it.

However, it was an attitude that started to go badly wrong for the
authorities at Gartree. I don’t think they realised the amount of boredom and unrest that was brewing under their softly-softly regime, or anticipated the extent of the trouble and violence that it would have to endure.

The situation was simmering just below boiling point. There were increasing numbers of demonstrations, sit-outs and escape attempts, incidents which were building towards a bloody climax in the Gartree riots of 1972.

A great many people fell by the wayside during this period. There was no one you could open up to in there, and even if you just wanted to give a view, there was no guarantee that anybody would listen to it. You’d see broody blokes sitting around the prison on their own, with no one taking any notice of them.

Things were either up or down in there. There was no
in-between
. There were laughs and there were characters, the comedians of the prison, and for most of us they were enough to keep the days ticking over. But some people got to the stage where they felt they just couldn’t go on. They’d smash up their cells in sudden fits of anger. They’d cut their wrists to get attention. They’d try to commit suicide for real.

And it wasn’t just inmates who sometimes found the whole thing impossible to cope with; it was the screws as well. Just as much as there was good and bad amongst the screws, there was strength and weakness as well. During my two stretches at Gartree alone, from 1970 to 1972 and from 1974 to 1977, I saw at least fifteen screws crack up. I remember one cook smashing the kitchen to pieces and leaving the prison on a stretcher. Another screw got seven years for interfering with children, and a Principal Officer’s son was nicked for housebreaking.

The screws did take a lot of stick in that place. Gartree prison was built specially for the secure detention of dangerous criminals, and it was designed to resist every possible means of escape. It’s
situated in the middle of a flat wasteland near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, and the feeling of isolation is overwhelming. No screw wanted to be there.

Those who were there tried to liven up their evenings by inviting some of the women prison visitors they met to the officers’ club. A mate of mine called Danny Leishman, knowing this, set them up beautifully. He arranged for two blokes, dressed in very convincing drag, to come in on a visit. They were invited to stay for a drink after the visit, and two screws took them to the club, where they spent hours trying to chat them up. This went on until closing time, at which point one of the lads went, ‘Well, boys, goodnight,’ and lifted his skirt. He wasn’t wearing any underwear, either….

There were certain screws we could wind up very easily. The one who always comes to mind was a Brummie called Ranger, a Senior Officer (SO) in charge of C-wing, where we were in Gartree. We had a laugh with him when the officers’ uniform was changed from dark blue to light blue – we called the new suits Postman Pats. Ranger didn’t want to give up his dark blue uniform, and the cons wound him up to stage a one-man protest. To the great delight of the men, he refused to give in until he was officially ordered by the Governor to hand the old uniform back.

He was as thick as a plank, Ranger, with great big hands and fingers like bananas. He was a nervous man with a habit of tapping on things, always tapping away, with a spoon or whatever else was in his hand. Ronnie Bender used to take the piss out of him for that, and he would get very embarrassed.

He used to supervise the serving of the dinners, and he was so determined to catch someone nicking an extra bit of chicken or whatever that he watched too closely. We used to take things from right under his nose. But he could only stand so much. One day he yelled, ‘I’ve had enough,’ and chucked everything into the air – the pots, the pans, the dinner, the lot. And he just walked out.

When Ranger cracked up, it was the culmination of various things. Life had become unbearable within the prison system. His mind couldn’t take it. He was living under constant pressure, with the perpetual fear of violence breaking out.

Some screws would say, ‘Leave me out of it. It’s nothing to do with me – I’m only doing my job,’ but some cons would make allowances for no one: they saw a uniform, and a uniform only. These were dangerous and often paranoid men who would think nothing of sticking a knife in a screw. Screws got assaulted and battered – they were trying to contain men who had nothing to lose.

Certainly, the authorities came to learn a lot from the way they set out to deal with the ‘super-criminals’. By the late seventies, they were starting to regain control of their own long-term prisons. Significantly, this was happening at a time when many of the inmates who’d been sentenced in the sixties were moving to lesser-security prisons, or, like us, had burnt up a lot of anger and frustration after years of confrontation and chaos.

T
he dirtiest fight I ever heard of took place at Durham prison just before Chris, Ronnie Bender and I arrived there in May 1969. It involved a con, called Micky Keogh – a man who was unlucky enough to be run over by a bus and killed the day he came out of prison.

Micky was a post office and bank robber. People still talk about the time he went out with a shotgun, dressed as a Mexican bandit with two rolls of shells round his neck – while staying at Wormwood Scrubs prison hostel, the halfway house between his imprisonment and release. Needless to say, he didn’t remain at liberty for very long. He went back to prison for a second long stretch, after which he met his fate.

We came across him in Durham during his first term of imprisonment. Things were very rough there in the wake of the John McVicar escape; the army was even brought in at one point to control the prison. This happened after the Assistant Chief Constable of Durham announced that professional criminals were now able to lay their hands on a lot of money and, because of their contacts, could have limited access to nuclear weapons. He added
that these criminals would not hesitate to use such weapons, or get others to use them on their behalf, to break out of prison. It was a ridiculous theory, obviously, but the authorities took it seriously, and for several months we had troops with machine-guns guarding E-wing, where the most dangerous criminals were housed.

There was quite a bit of bad feeling between the cons and the screws, who were a very thick breed. Their pride and joy was hearing themselves, and knowing that everybody else could hear them, as they marched to the prison across the cobbles in their hobnailed boots. They didn’t like the Londoners, especially since we all stayed together in a clique, as we did in every prison; they saw us as mouthy bastards.

We had arrived at Durham to find Micky Keogh at the height of fame over his confrontation with a certain screw. It all began the day he shouted out at this screw, ‘You should be at home with your old woman,’ and the screw yelled back, ‘I wonder who’s doing
your
old woman?’

Micky couldn’t do anything about it at the time because he was locked up, but several days later another pal of ours, Joe Martin, spotted the same screw coming on duty. Micky had deliberately not gone to the toilet for a few days, and he had collected these tablets called ‘yellow perils’ from the doctor. They’re guaranteed to make you run to the toilet like you’ve never been before. Take one and you’re in trouble. Take two, and they’ll completely do you out. Keogh immediately took six, and then he disappeared for a while. Shortly afterwards, he came back with a bag which he’d done his business in. He walked into the work room and straight up to the screw, who was leaning backwards on a chair, balancing on its two back legs.

The screw opened his mouth, startled, when he realised he was about to be attacked. At exactly the same moment Micky produced this bag from behind his back, said ‘Remember me?’ and went whack, straight in the screw’s face. Nobody could believe what was
happening. Micky’s stomach must have been completely gone for a week afterwards, and what the incident did to the screw, psychologically, is anybody’s guess. The cons used to wind him up rotten. Every time my brother saw him he’d say loudly, ‘There’s a terrible smell round here.’

Micky had to go before a VC or Visiting Committee. These were called when an offence was considered too serious for the prison authorities to deal with. A disciplinary body composed of local landowners and civic dignitaries would be brought to the prison to hear the case and impose punishment.

At Micky’s VC, there was a reaction of utter shock. Someone commented, ‘Only an animal would do this.’

He said, ‘Never mind about that, who wants to be Richard the Third?’, and tried to jump over the table at the committee members. He was famous for that. I should explain that Richard the Third is Cockney rhyming slang, and a ‘Richard’ is prison slang for a toilet.

Another screw – this time a Principal Officer – suffered almost as horribly in an incident I myself was involved in, one or two years later in Gartree. Simply out of boredom and for the sheer devilment of it, I decided with three other men to take two screws hostage and smash up the chokey (punishment) block. I was already in the block with a Geordie boy who looked like Genghis Khan, a little gay fella called Barry and a bloke called Ronnie Bolden.

Ronnie Bolden was in the nick for a robbery in London. The gang had got away with £30,000, but Ronnie’s wife was so frightened of the amount of money he’d brought home that she put it in the washing machine and tried to wash it away. All the police took away with them when they came to search his home was one big lump of goo which the forensic people later proved had once been banknotes.

I’d been down the block for quite a long time because I’d been
involved in an attempted escape, and I had a job on the hot plate, where the food was served. The PO used to come over from his office, and he’d be standing there talking to me while he was putting the tobacco into his pipe.

On the morning we decided to have the tear-up, I turned the hot plate fully on. I called the PO out of his office and stood talking to him about radios. Just as he put his tobacco down, I grabbed hold of his wrists and pulled him across the hot plate. The pipe dropped out of his hand. He ended up writhing around on the floor, refusing to let go of one of the four legs at the bottom of the hot plate.

Ronnie Bolden, meanwhile, had come up behind a screw called Saunders, whom I’d had recent disagreements with. He got his hands behind his neck, frogmarched him into a cell, took his whistle, his hat and his keys, and banged him up. Then Barry jumped on him, started to kiss him and gave him a love bite on the neck.

Next thing, the Geordie came out with a bucket which he’d urinated and done all sorts in. He poured the contents all over the PO. I’d already let go of the PO because I saw what was coming, and I didn’t want it over me. We dragged him into a cell and locked him up. Then we barricaded the one gateway entrance to the block, but all of a sudden the alarms were going off. One of the security cameras had probably picked something up.

We held out for five hours, but the screws’ reinforcements finally got in by cutting the doors from the outside. They were going to beat the life out of us, but I ripped the piping from the toilet and I said to the Chief, ‘Anybody touches me and I’m going to kill one of you.’ There must have been sixty screws there for four of us. And they knew I meant what I said. I was known and feared for being capable of carrying out my threats.

The Chief said, ‘I assure you if you decide to go back, not a finger will be laid on you.’ Not one of them touched us. Obviously we got nicked and charged with assault, smashing prison property, etc.

When it came to the VCs, we played up. When the screws arrived to take us to the hearings we were all standing there naked, refusing to get dressed – even the little gay bloke. They had to wrap blankets round us and carry us in. The committee comprised a male and female magistrate and another woman who was taking notes. Barry was charged with causing damage and assaulting a prison officer. He said, ‘I fancied the screw. I decided to kiss him and give him a love bite.’ He got twenty-eight days’ punishment. I was given fifty-six days extra in the block.

When it was Bolden’s turn he threw the blanket off so the two women could see him naked, and started masturbating in front of them. This, plus the fact that he’d thrown a bucket of piss and shit over a Principal Officer, went down very badly at the VC. He was given fifty-six days and shanghai’d out to another prison.

Around the same time Chris, who was then at Albany prison on the Isle of Wight, got involved in a confrontation with screws; but he came out of it a lot worse than I did. There had been some trouble about food and conditions, and Chris had been sent to the block with a few fellas called Charlie Robson, Don Barrett, Norman Parker, Taffy Thomas and Freddie Sanson, whose nephew is the England footballer Kenny Sanson. One night, they all decided that the next day they would have a disturbance. But it looked as though one of them put the word in the ear of authority….

The next morning, before anything could happen, seven screws opened Chris’s door and started bashing him to hell. He did his best to defend himself: he broke one screw’s jaw and another’s hand. Freddie was out of his cell and came to Chris’s aid, but the screws battered him to the floor. Don Barrett also could have helped but he didn’t lift a finger, which caused a rift between my brother and him.

Chris was left in such a bad state that they had to get him out of Albany prison. They decided to send him to Parkhurst, but when he arrived there they refused him entry because of his injuries. It was
then decided to drive him halfway across the country, to Hull. They refused to accept him there too. He was sent back to Albany, and again moved out. In the end he was returned to Parkhurst, where he was finally taken in.

Just after this, Freddie Sanson was transferred to Hull prison. One day, after finishing a game of football, he went back to his cell. When Jimmy Hussey, one of the Great Train Robbers, took him in a cup of tea he found him dead. Some people suggested it was a result of the beating.

Violent scenes with screws were usually triggered by boredom, provocation or dissatisfaction with prison conditions and facilities. Fights among cons, on the other hand, could flare up for any number of reasons. Spur-of-the-moment arguments, usually over simple things, were a common cause; so were personal grudges and unresolved arguments. Charlie Richardson, for instance, held a grudge against John McVicar and Joey Martin after they blanked – ignored – him on the escape from Durham prison. Charlie was shouting, ‘You rats, you stags, you left me here!’ out of the window as he watched them breaking out. Charlie was there when McVicar was recaptured and brought to Leicester, and he wound up a bloke called ‘Hate ’Em All’ Harry Johnson to have a go at McVicar. One day McVicar was having a wash when Harry came up behind him and tried to do him. Johnny Dark, a professional boxer who had fallen foul of Securicor, ended up knocking them both out. Harry Johnson was a man you could never turn your back on. For no reason whatsoever, he once stabbed a geezer on the landing in front of all the screws at Hull prison; on another occasion he cut George Ince for humiliating Charlie Kray by having an affair with his wife Dolly. After that, Harry was sent to Gartree. I was doing my second period in Gartree at the time, and Chris, Ronnie Bender and Ian Barrie were with me. A lot of people were worried about Harry
being there because he was so unpredictable. He was told by Chris and Ronnie Bender, ‘Step out of line and you’ll never walk in a straight line again.’ It was the only language he understood.

Hostilities between prisoners could carry on for weeks, months or even years before they came to a physical conclusion, and Chris always seemed to have several feuds on his hands at once. Some he was able to settle quite promptly, like the one with Dougie Parkes, a known villain from Sheffield. He upset Chris in Gartree during that boiling hot summer of 1976. About four or five weeks went by. One night we were watching
Top of the Pops
as usual, which was a favourite thing in prisons; in the small BBC TV room. ITV had a bigger room.

Dougie Parkes was in his regular seat near the front when Chris went to get a jug of boiling water for some tea. As he returned to his seat, he ‘accidentally’ tripped over Parkes and spilt boiling water all down his neck, shoulders and chest. Parkes was immediately rushed to hospital with second degree burns, and was on the danger list for about two weeks.

When they brought him back to prison, he said: ‘Chrissy Lambrianou did it deliberately because of previous incidents in Gartree.’ He was told by us in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t drop this allegation, he would never leave the hospital alive. After three or four days of kicking that idea around, he saw sense and the charge was dropped. Chris went in front of a VC and was given a caution about taking care when getting boiling water from the tea urn.

Other scores may have taken longer to settle, but they were no less satisfying for Chris. Take the instance of Don Barrett. Chris had it in for him after the fight with the screws in Albany and Freddie Sanson’s subsequent death. Even though they didn’t meet for another seven or eight years, Chris was gunning for him straightaway. It was 1979 when Barrett was moved to Maidstone
prison. By now, rumours were widely circulating that he had been giving information to the police. Chris went up to him one day and said, ‘You’re a grass.’

So Barrett came to me to find out where he stood. I said, ‘I don’t know anything about it, but I’ll give you a bit of advice, Don. Stay away from Chris.’

I was about to be decategorised and sent to a Cat. C prison. While I was waiting, I worked as the swimming pool attendant at Maidstone. One Saturday afternoon, I was sitting by the side of the swimming pool. Next to it was a little putting green, where they used to give you steel golf clubs to knock a ball about. Next thing, Chris came walking out, picked up a club and put it up to the end of Don Barren’s nose. He said, ‘When my Tony moves from here, I’m going to do you.’

He wouldn’t risk it until I’d left the prison, because he didn’t want me getting linked to any trouble. I moved the following Monday, and at the same time Chris was sent down the block for some misdemeanour or other. He escaped from there, went straight into the wing where Barrett was and broke his jaw. Barrett is now known to have put more than two hundred men away as a grass. He’s the only man to have gone supergrass twice: apparently he fingered the Wembley Bank Robbers.

Grasses, obviously, we hated; and Jimmy Humphries, the porn king, was another. Our differences with him began in Maidstone. We’d been hearing all sorts of stories about him. He was said to have boasted that right from the beginning he could have cleared the names of Patsy Murphy and the others convicted of the Luton Post Office job; yet he didn’t do a thing to help them. He let them rot in prison for twelve years, after which they walked out on appeal. We’d also heard whispers that he was running with the police, and Chris was starting to get the hump with him, but the thing that sealed it was something Humphries said in a cell one day in front of
about seven of us. Out of the blue, he announced, ‘I’m going to get a man twenty years.’