Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (22 page)

I know a guy who used the tubing of his bed as a still! He plugged all the holes along the tubing so that nothing could escape. He then made the brew and, using a funnel, poured it into the bed frame through a hole he’d drilled himself, which was then plugged up.
He’d made a little tap which fitted into the hole, and when he wanted a drink he simply had to pour it from the bed into a plastic cup. It took us a long time to discover how he got so legless in the lock-up hour between five and six o’clock….

The screws had a general idea of what was going on. Sometimes they would put you on report if they caught you, but at other times they turned a blind eye. Once or twice I left a bucket of hooch sitting blatantly in my cell with a towel over it and no one even bothered to look at it. They knew there would be a brew-up around Christmas or holiday times, and it was the only thing we had to look forward to as far as Christmas was concerned.

It was a very down time of year in prison. The cons themselves seemed to change a lot; and the prison became a much more solemn place. You could feel a little bit more atmosphere in as much as they’d have Christmas trees, and some of the men would do their best to cheer everyone up. The food improved a bit, and much as you tried not to admit it, Christmas still did mean something a bit special, even in prison. But there was no joy in it. There were no family aspects. It wasn’t real. The best times of the year were, in fact, in the summer, when we could go out on evening exercise and enjoy the quiet of the night.

Despite sensational revelations in the press that Britain’s prisons were overflowing with alcohol and brimming with illegal drugs, the hooch production, which is all I ever saw, was grinding to a halt towards the end of the seventies when the authorities were regaining control of the dispersal prisons. I heard some outrageous stories about Ronnie Bender. He was said at one time to be running things in Chelmsford prison so successfully that he had his own bar! There were even questions asked about him in the House of Commons, but he was very well liked and respected by screws and cons alike, and no one paid much attention to the rumours.

Drugs, I suppose, were available if wanted. I won’t deny that a bit of that went on, but the stories that go round about drugs in prison are wild exaggerations. We were never involved in anything like that. Like everyone else, we stuck to the people and things we knew.

Everybody seemed to find their place in prison very quickly, forming friendships with others of their own kind. You could instantly tell how and where a new inmate was going to fit in. The men who were in for fraud, for example, tried to look educated and spent their time studying together. They seemed to be trying to tell us, ‘We shouldn’t be here.’

Then there were the cons who came in because of a bit of thieving or burglary. They kept themselves to themselves, never made any bids for power, and simply did their best to get on with their sentences.

The out-and-out villains – bank robbers and their ilk – wanted to be seen to be the same inside prison as they were outside it. They had to establish a high-ranking position in the pecking order – they had to gain and maintain respect; as a result, they were often seen to be living a bit better than the other cons. They would always support any protest on the side of the underdog against authority.

And then there were the murderers. I never believed that more than 20 per cent of murderers had committed real murders. There were arsonists who managed to kill people as a by-product of their obsession for starting fires (strangely enough, the arsonists I met were always red-haired). There were men who committed crimes of passion; and youngsters who went out for a night, got in a gang fight and ended up stabbing somebody who later died. Is that murder? Most criminals would avoid murder at all costs; it would be a last resort. The domestic murderer who killed his wife or his lover never really had any influence in prison. He was going to do four years in a closed nick and then get farmed out to a lesser prison. The bloke who murdered someone in a fight or in the course of theft
would be doing anything up to twelve or thirteen years. He would most likely be a young guy. He wanted to run with the pack, be with the boys, but at the same time he realised it could damage his future and so he tried to steer a middle course. It could be very difficult.

Then there was the 20 per cent which we fitted into. We were people who had influence, who did our best in trying circumstances. The other cons tended to come to us with their problems, because of the respect we had within the system. That could make life very wearing.

To an extent, the screws observed the inmates’ hierarchy. The power of personality was at play a lot here.

At the other end of the scale were what we called the hobbits, the bread and butter of the prison system, the inadequates of society. Some of the hobbits were sex offenders and some of them were prison fodder, the sort of people who were easily led, were consistent offenders in petty crime and were likely to spend their lives going in and out of prison. They had no say in the system. They were usually as harmless as they were tragic, and everyone abused them.

The hobbits usually worked for the screws around the hot plate and the tea rooms. They loved to wear their white jackets for serving out the food, and they always used to be scurrying about amongst the piles of washing up, wiping the trays and getting everything ready. You couldn’t even begin to rehabilitate half of them – they were just not capable of surviving on their own. In prison they had their food and a bit of company, they could run around wheeling and dealing over little things, and that’s about as far as they were going to go.

The major sex offenders were kept away from us under Rule 43 protection, but other nonces, as we called them, were integrated into the system. Many of them would approach known criminals, wanting to make their tea and do their running around in return for
protection. We never went looking for these go-fers; they came to us. We seemed to collect them. I had one called Micky Fossett, who came to three different prisons with me.

He was doing life for a sex offence, a bad one. He committed it as a kid, and he never stopped regretting it from the moment it happened. He used to go and save a seat for me in the television room, and bring my pot of tea.

One night I got stopped by five Geordie boys who said, ‘Look, that Mick is a nonce.’

Another bloke, a Yorkshireman called Bernie, said, ‘We don’t like nonces. You want to do something about it.’

I was in a bit of a funny position, because I couldn’t be seen to favour Fossett, so I said, ‘He does a lot of running around for me.’ I also let them know what would happen to Fossett if he ever fell foul of me.

He suited my purposes. And by using him, I protected him. Without me, he wouldn’t have had much of a life. He would have been under Rule 43 in the segregation unit.

Another mate of ours, Billy Gentry, used a rapist called Ted as his tea boy. Ted was a right nutter, known as the Phantom of Epping Forest. He used to run about the drainage system underneath the forest, which led out into roads and gardens. He’d force his way into houses in these different places and rape all these old dears.

He got one old lady into bed and the next thing she said was, ‘Will you come back to see me again, Ted?’

During one of his raids he broke into this house and found a box full of sovereigns behind the chimney. He started giving a sovereign to each of his rape victims, and that’s what led to his capture and conviction. When it came to trial in the Old Bailey thirty women gave evidence against him, and they were all calling him by his first name. But the fact that he had given each of them a sovereign turned every single one of them, in law, into a prostitute.

In contrast to the grim routine of prison life, the laughs we had seemed funnier than they would have anywhere else, and the sadnesses more tragic. There was a dreadful incident concerning Tubbsy Turner, one of my old schoolfriends. He was convicted of hijacking offences with his mate George Murray, and he had recently married George’s sister Frances. She was only in her early twenties when a phone call came through to the prison to say she’d died – just suddenly dropped dead. The screws were very worried about telling Tubbsy, so Chris had to do it. He went to break the news and all of a sudden I heard this yell – this painful, anguished cry which I’ll never forget. He never got over it, Tubbsy.

We came across quite a bit of tragedy during our years inside. I’ll always remember a fellow con called John Duddy, who was sentenced to thirty years for his part in the Shepherds Bush cop killings with Harry Roberts and John Whitney. John Duddy had no idea what was going to happen that day, and was only involved in the murder of three policemen through his friendship with the other two.

He was a man who had a great love of children, and would cry at the slightest touch of sadness, maybe reading something in the newspaper or watching it on television. He’d often come up to me in tears about something terrible that had happened. He was quite the opposite of Harry Roberts, who was a strange man – very aloof. On Christmas Day 1970 in Leicester prison, Chris, Charlie Richardson, Fred Foreman, Ronnie Bender, Paul Seabourne, Micky Keogh and I were in a maximum-security block watching
The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
with John Duddy. Ingrid Bergman plays a missionary who leads a group of Chinese orphans over the mountains, escaping from the Japanese. Duddy couldn’t help himself; he cried his eyes out. He was a very humane man. One day he said to me, ‘I’ll do fifteen years and then I’ll turn it in. I don’t want to do any more than that.’ And he did. He died of a heart attack when he’d done fifteen years.

If tragedy and comedy became larger than life in the dreary surroundings of a prison, the same was the case for other dramatic events: during 1972 the idea of escaping became more and more irresistible as an adventure, the ultimate showdown with authority.

The first attempt was in July. It started as a demonstration. We’d decided to stay out for a couple of nights in the exercise yard as part of a campaign for the prisoners’ rights organisation, PROP. We took our blankets out and we had access through the windows to water, coffee and tins of this and that. Some of the cons put their blankets up against the fence to make tents. Then they started digging a tunnel, under cover of the blankets, leading right from that fence to the outer one.

I went on to the roof of the gym with Ronnie Bender and another lifer called Ali Starkey, who was a second cousin of the Beatles’ Ringo Starr. We were told about the tunnel by a man called Colin Beaumont, who asked us if we were interested in joining the
break-out
. Of course we were interested. We were told to be ready within an hour. The idea was that the cons would cause chaos in the yard to divert attention while the lifers escaped.

In the meantime, a fellow con told us he felt sick. He went back into the wing and reported the escape plan to the authorities. All of a sudden, about a hundred screws came marching out and pulled the blankets away from the fence. I thought there was going to be a bloodbath, because every man was looking forward to his bid for freedom, but the screws didn’t try to manhandle us. Everyone on the demonstration was fined £1 or £2 each.

The con who reported us was put on protection and released a couple of years later to a life of misery. You can’t hide from four hundred men who’ve got the hump with you. We were gutted.

But shortly afterwards I tried again. I was working at the time in the light engineering shop, which backed on to a fence. On the other side of that fence was a second one, about eighteen feet away, and that was the prison perimeter fence.

The shop was in a prefabricated building which had a window at the back. There was thin wire covering the window. We had access in the shop to nuts, bolts and bits of piping, and we used this to build a ladder in three sections. Along with a fellow con called Billy O’Gorman I intended to go into the back storeroom, cut through the wire at the window, get on to the building itself, get the ladder and make a bridge between the building and the first fence. Having crossed over to the top of the first fence, we’d drop down and run over to the second and final fence with the ladder.

Almost everything was against this plan succeeding. There were ‘tremblers’ on each fence which would set off an alarm if any pressure was felt. There were dogs patrolling the no-man’s-land between the two fences. Every inch of the prison grounds was on camera. And the land surrounding the prison was flat, so any escapees could be seen and picked up immediately.

Still, I thought it was worth a try. We picked a time when the dog-handlers were supposed to be on their tea breaks, and the screws had dropped their guard. I had got through the window with the wire-cutters when suddenly the civilian instructor decided to walk into the store for a chat. As soon as he saw me, he hit the alarm bell. I was taken straight down the block and brought in front of the Governor the next day.

I had to come before a VC, and I was given fifty-six days’ loss of privileges, loss of pay, solo confinement and non-associated labour. What was unusual was that they also decided I would lose 180 days’ remission at the end of my sentence. I was only the second lifer ever to lose remission. But it didn’t put me off the idea of getting my freedom early. And the next occasion was to prove quite a spectacular one.

O
n the last Sunday in November 1972 I was looking forward to the latest mass escape, and hoping it would be third time lucky for me. Certain cons had decided on a plan whereby we would tie up whatever screws were in our way, get into the exercise yard and make our escape through the fence.

The great day came, but my wing and one other couldn’t join in. Gartree prison was shaped like an H, and the passage connecting our wings to the other two was blocked by iron gates which had been locked. You could never tell when the gates would be locked or unlocked, there was no set pattern, and we had been taking pot luck that they’d be open. I was very disappointed I couldn’t be involved in it, and because we were cut off from the other two wings we didn’t know what was happening.

I found out when I wandered up to the wing dining room to collect my teatime meal. I was with a man called Patsy Sutton from Notting Hill Gate. Patsy glanced towards the window and suddenly yelled, ‘Look!’ The fence around the yard was ringed with cons carrying weapons, about twenty of them. Some of them had big wire-cutters, and they were getting through the fences.

I later found out that the men had come out of their cells and into the passageway leading to the dining rooms, ostensibly to collect their meals. Instead they found the screw who had access to the yard, took him hostage, took his keys and let themselves out, clamping security gates up behind them as they went so nobody could get in or out. The door which took them out to the yard was the only one by which cons could enter and leave the prison.

Alarms were going off everywhere. Everybody had made it to the fence, and a couple of cons got through but were later recaptured. The grounds were like a battlefield, in complete chaos. Bricks were being thrown, and the dog-handlers came out. One dog ran straight over and jumped on the Governor. We saw a screw who specialised in PT hitting a con called Georgie Bell with a claw hammer. He immediately went down. We saw another screw hit an Irish kid called Danny with a brick. Patsy said, ‘I’m not having that!’ And the next thing we know, we’ve got a full-scale riot on our hands inside the prison. Patsy started the riot by throwing tables up into the air, and I stormed over to the serving hatch and upped all the trays of food. Another thirty or so men had already come into the dining room to get their meals, and by now they were all glued to what was going on in the yard. But none of the other cons could follow us in, because as soon as the alarm went off the gate to the wing was automatically locked.

In the dining room they had great big boilers and metal spoons which were like shovels, about four feet long. Patsy and I picked up one of those spoons and started to smash up the glass office where the screws sat. Inside were a PO and an SO, who couldn’t believe what was happening.

Patsy and I were the first to go back down the stairs. We broke the canteen door down and went in. We nicked all the tobacco, we took everything out … thousands of pounds’ worth of stock. I walked back towards the wing with a bag full of tobacco, tins of
fruit, sweets, sugar and coffee. The gate into the wing was still locked, of course, and I started throwing the goodies through the gate to the men on the other side. The trouble had still not gone off in the wing at that point, and none of them picked anything up – probably because an Assistant Governor, a PO and a couple of screws were watching me.

In dispersal prisons the ranks worked like this: below the Governor, in descending order, were the Deputy Governor, four Assistant Governors, eight Principal Officers and twelve Senior Officers. An Assistant Governor, a PO and an SO would be running each wing. There were also Chief Officers One, Two and Three who were in charge of the screws.

The Assistant Governor at the gate said to me, ‘I’m giving you a direct order to return to your cell’, which was impossible, because I couldn’t go through a locked gate to get to it. On the other side of the gate, Patsy Murphy suddenly said to the other cons, ‘What’s the matter with you lot?’ and started picking things up. Then the others started. The Assistant Governor suddenly realised the ugliness of the situation.

The cons began battering this solid steel gate off its hinges. It came open, and with that they started to turn on the Assistant Governor, the PO and the screws, who made a run for the gate leading into the yard, in fear of their lives. They were lucky; they made it. Another minute and they would have been hostages.

All of a sudden the wing was going up in the air, and we started breaking into the offices. We got into the welfare office and took out a bundle of papers and reports.

There were two punishment, units, one downstairs and one above our wing. The top unit was sealed off from the rest. It contained grasses and sex offenders who were under Rule 43 protection. They were kept behind thick, unbreakable glass. We started to batter that door. Some of the men were going to hang the
nonces off the landing of the top floor. But because of the physical security of the unit, the glass and concrete and special precautions, we couldn’t get into it. So we decided to set fire to it and burn them out, but the unit was indestructible. The authorities became very worried about these cons. We couldn’t get to them ourselves, but we made sure nobody else did, and we held them hostage there for two days, in turns.

The authorities had about a thousand screws on duty within an hour of the riot breaking out. They completely ringed the prison. We were being hosed with jets of water, and the helicopters were up.

We went down the first landing and knocked a big hole in the end cell. This gave us access to the roof and we could then cross over from B-wing, where we were, to D-wing and back. The inmates in A-and C-wings had already started to tear the place up. Our whole idea was to wreck the prison, and we completely demolished it. We set fire to the gym, we ripped the wings apart, we smashed up the kitchens and the canteens, we knocked out every pane of glass in the place, and we tore all the doors off to use as barricades.

In the meantime we’d been having a look at the papers we’d taken out of the welfare office, and we found out that Billy O’Gorman, the con who was going to come with me on the escape from the workshop, had been giving information about all of us to the authorities. He’d been knocking about with the major criminals in the nick, and all the time his reports and opinions were going down in official documents.

Billy, who was a ringer for the tennis player Billie Jean King, was inside for a robbery and a wrap-up (tying people up), plus he’d been convicted in connection with the murder of a woman greyhound owner called the Merry Widow. He’d been having an affair with her. While he was in prison, he was also questioned about the proceeds from a jewellery robbery.

Nobody suspected he was a grass. Yet there he was giving his views on who should be paroled and who shouldn’t, and the authorities were listening. What right did they have to ask another criminal for his thoughts about the rest of us?

On my record, I was described by O’Gorman as an anarchist and a troublemaker. In the file of another con, Terry Middlemas, he stated, ‘In my view, if Middlemas was paroled he would commit major crime again.’ I gave the file to Terry and said, ‘I think you’d better read that.’

Billy O’Gorman had obviously done a lot of harm. One con called Charlie Manley was certain, up to the time of the riot, that he was about to be granted parole. On his record, O’Gorman said, ‘This man should never be paroled at any time.’ We showed it to Charlie, and he sat in his cell and cried his eyes out. We didn’t take his cell door off, we were that sorry for him.

Of course the men were going to hurt O’Gorman. Cons were coming up, spitting on him and punching him. When the riot was over, and we were all in punishment, he was the only man to be seen sweeping up the landings. He was cleaning up the glass. He was later transferred to Wakefield prison, where he went on protection and hanged himself. In a way I suppose we were all to blame, but he did what he did, he knew the consequences if he was found out, he
was
found out, and he couldn’t live with the guilt and the fear.

The rioting continued through the night of the Sunday it began and into the next day. The place was in uproar. We were all masked up, and nobody could get into the wings past the barricades.

About seven o’clock on the Monday evening we heard a voice coming through a megaphone outside the wing. Joe Witty, the Deputy Governor, was out there, surrounded by forty screws with crash helmets and shields. He was shouting out my name, asking me to come to the window.

He said, ‘We’re asking you, Lambrianou, to hand back the wing
and get the men to give up their fight.’ I couldn’t do that. Snooker balls went flying out the window, and we began to light more fires.

We decided to give in early on the Tuesday morning, but there was a lot more trouble ahead. The nick was in ruins; there was nothing left. There were no windows, and few doors had been left standing, so we were held in groups of four or five in what cells were available. We’d insisted on this for our own protection. Every prison in the country had sent screws in there, and we didn’t know what was going on.

The authorities had to know at all costs where the A-men were, so they were quick to get the doors back on our cells. When we went back on to the landing, Roy The Weasel James said to me, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your budgie’s dead.’ Roy had not been part of the riot, and we had left his door intact because he was coming up to his parole. We did the same for other lifers who were looking at an imminent release. The screws had murdered my budgie with a shoelace. The story was the same in all the other cells. They’d pissed on the floors. Photographs were torn up, the radios were wrecked, all our personal belongings were ripped to bits.

Obviously, after a riot like that, feelings were running very high. The screws were out to get their pound of flesh. They started giving us breakfast at teatime and dinner about eleven o’clock at night. The food was freezing cold and it looked as though it had been tampered with. They were making us slop out – empty the buckets which were for use as toilets in our cells – one at a time.

One morning I’d had enough. I said, ‘If I don’t get any food today, or clean clobber, I’m going to start performing again.’ An hour later I was still waiting to slop out, so I flung my bucket down the landing. There were about forty screws along the landing who did nothing – just stood there with their big overcoats on. The prison was freezing cold because the wind was howling through the open spaces where there used to be windows.

I issued another threat. I said, ‘If I don’t get a hot meal by nine o’clock tonight and if I don’t get my exercise today, I’m going to start making my own exercise ground through the cells.’ One thing I never did in prison was make an idle threat. So when no food, no clean clothes and no exercise were forthcoming by nine o’clock that night, I took action.

I went back into my cell. When you’re an A-man your bed is sealed to the floor, but I wrenched it off and wedged it against the door with the other cell furniture to form a barricade. I used the end of the bed frame to start digging through to the next cell.

I knocked out the first three bricks with the end of the frame, and then carried on making the hole bigger. I could see this kid, Jimmy, looking at me as I put my head through into his cell. The cells on the landing were alternately Cat. A and Cat. B., and Jimmy was a young lifer on Cat. B. There I was talking to him, and he was under the bed because he knew what was going to happen. He was going, ‘Please, Tony; they’re going to kill us.’ By now the screws were desperately trying to get into my cell to stop whatever was going on in there. They couldn’t get past the barricade until they got hold of this tool which was like a portable jack. It had a chisel end which they used as a lever to force the door open. The door collapsed, and suddenly I was confronted by fifteen screws who were about to do me. I broke out of the cell and made a run for the block, where some of my mates were. I was on a closed landing, so I could only go one way. Somehow I had to try and get along there and down the stairs, past groups of screws who were waiting for me all along the way. I had to run the gauntlet. In the ensuing battle I connected with some of them and missed others. All the time they were grabbing and kicking at me, and half of them were in each other’s way, getting their legs and arms tangled up.

Finally they got me up against a wall and tried to tear the clothes
off me. It was coming up to midnight and everybody was locked up, so I had no help. I ended up with half a vest on, and there was nothing I could do to defend myself. You’re at a disadvantage when you’ve got no clothes on.

They kicked me into the strongbox, which is a special punishment cell. You get put in there when even the punishment block cannot control you. It had a steel shell and a very thick, indestructible glass panel, about three feet by three feet and twelve inches thick, set in concrete in the roof. There were ladders going spirally around the outside, so that you could be observed through any of the half-dozen peepholes at any time. The doors opened outwards, and as you went in, you came down two steps to the cell itself. It was like a cell within a cell. The bed was a solid lump of wood, and you got a leather blanket.

The screws had all gone in and pissed on the floor. It was a sloping floor, and any liquid drained itself off, but the stench in there was out of this world.

I remember waking up the next morning and hearing a bloke next door to me, on the other side of a big, thick grille. He was saying, ‘I think they’ve done my legs.’ I never found out who it was. The only other sound I heard for the next two days was echoes.

During this time I didn’t even have a glass of water. I thought about Frankie Fraser. He must have done nearly as much time in strongboxes as the rest of us put together. I remembered an occasion when he was going down for punishment and he said to the screws, ‘If you’re going to punish me, punish me properly.’ He wasn’t going to do it in a normal punishment cell; he had to be in a strongbox. Frank said, ‘Gandhi suffered, and so did God.’ He didn’t even want a sandwich or a radio – he wanted what he was entitled to, and that was it. He was a man of honour, Frank, and he had an acute sense of right and wrong. I was once in the punishment block at Gartree when he was brought down following a disturbance. He
went into his cell, and he had to do his business in a pot. I heard the screw going, ‘Frank, at least you could have put the lid on it.’