Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror

by Lambrianou, Tony

  Another con, a bloke called Paul Seabourne, struck a most dramatic blow against authority. He said to Ronnie Biggs one day in Wandsworth, ‘I’m going to get you out of here.’ By God, did he! He didn’t get paid for Biggs’s escape. He organised it because he thought the authorities had taken a liberty and he wanted to kick them. He kicked them OK - right in the bollocks.

  In prison, politics didn’t come into it. It didn’t matter that there were IRA terrorists amongst us. We were all together, and we were all anti-authority, pure and simple. We would have done anything to fuck the system – me probably more than a lot of people.

  I spent more than three years of my fifteen in punishment blocks. At different times throughout the sentence I was done for assault, breaking and entering within the prison, and stealing. I was involved in riots and attempted escapes. I was generally a troublemaker, a bloke who didn’t take orders, and I couldn’t have cared less what punishment might result. What could they do to us? Put us down the block? We were already deprived of our liberty. The block was just a less privileged form of imprisonment. It was no deterrent. You were behind a locked door, whatever part of the prison you were in.

  If anything, you came out of the block in a more belligerent frame of mind, more likely to create further trouble than you were when you went in. The screws and the governing staff knew this, and they would punish offences according to how they viewed them. If it wasn’t an explosive incident, they’d find it better just to let it die a natural death.

  They also had to be careful not to upset other inmates. If major trouble broke out on one wing, the news would spread across the whole prison. If one wing wasn’t going to labour, the message would reach the rest of us and we would all stop work. If we were refusing food because it wasn’t up to standard, everybody would end up refusing food. Within the prison fraternity, everybody was expected to take part when a widespread protest arose. Those who didn’t found that life could become difficult: cells might be set on fire; people might be given righthanders or generally isolated and tormented, denounced as stags and grasses. You can’t play with the fox and run with the hounds. There were exceptions, notably lifers who were coming to the end of their sentences. No one would want to endanger their chances of parole.

  The screws knew that if a protest really went off, it would be bad, and for a lot of the time they pursued a policy of appeasement. I’ve seen prison Governors sitting in the exercise yard begging the men to come back inside, just trying to contain what they feared might happen. It could, and did get dangerous. And from what I can see, things have not changed greatly in the prison system over the years: the Strangeways riots in Manchester in 1989 would seem to prove that inmates were as discontented later on as they were in my time.

  Food was one of the main problems. In some places the meals were a lot of filth. The food that came into the nick was of a pretty good quality, but it’s what they turned it into at the end of the day that caused the problems. Then there were the people who dished it up, cons who weren’t always 100 per cent hygienic. I watched them to see how they bathed and that, and if I wasn’t impressed I wouldn’t touch the grub. Then we’d have to have another of our demonstrations to get them out of the kitchen.

  Sometimes, certain cons would be seen to be getting favours; they made themselves busy to go out and get that bit of extra, while others were too lazy. Straighten up the cook and you were on your way. Chris was like that: if he wanted something, he went down there and demanded it. And he got it. As a villain he was ranked alongside Frankie Fraser, and the general attitude towards Chris was, ‘Don’t fuck about with him or you’ll get yourself in trouble.’

  Visits were another common cause of complaint, on occasions when cons were refused permission for special visits with their families. Letters, too, became a source of aggravation. You’d hear some of the men saying, ‘They’re fucking about with the mail.’ Other cons were always complaining about the quality of the outside exercise facilities. Little things could easily build up into big things.

  And moods could change very quickly. You could wake up in the morning on top of the world, but if your pal had the hump and he did something, it was your duty to back him up. You got drawn into many hostilities other than your own.

  Additionally, there were various campaigns going on outside the nick which involved certain prisoners. One which we all enjoyed concerned the Great Train Robber Tommy Wisbey, a very down-to-earth man, whose wife Renee wanted her conjugal rights with him while he was serving his sentence, and made an issue of it in the sixties – unfortunately, without success. She was a real personality.

  Chris and I soon discovered in prison that we had more to prove than most. As members of the Kray firm we had a reputation which walked before us, and we had to live up to it at all times. It was a reputation which was open to challenge – always there for people to try to bring down, just as it had been on the streets of London. Other cons weren’t interested in Joe Bloggs, but they were interested in Charlie Richardson and Frankie Fraser and Tony and Chris Lambrianou. If we made a mistake, the rest would be on us like a bunch of vultures.

  We had to make sure that people feared and respected us, and again, as we had discovered on the outside, it was the threat of violence rather than the use of it that carried the day – although obviously we had to be seen to be able to do it on the occasions when it did come to a confrontation. We always carved a tool, because we never knew what we were dealing with. Interestingly, the greatest weapon you could have in prison was a pot of piss. Not many people would take that on!

  My brother once had a set-to with a Londoner called John in Maidstone prison. One day, this John was going into the wing as Chris was leaving it to go to labour. He shouldered my brother out of the way, so Chris spun round and smacked him in the face. Later in the day, John approached my brother and pulled out a small knife he’d made up in the prison shop. Chris produced a six-inch nail and nearly dug his eyes out with it. They both got put down the block, and John was then transferred to another prison. His behaviour had been a challenge, and no challenge could be shrugged off. A slight on us, or the twins – or indeed the name of the Kray firm – would be quickly pounced upon.

  In the early days of our sentence in Wandsworth, Chris gave a bloke called Tony Laing a right-hander for hitting Connie Whitehead on the chin. Laing said, ‘I thought Whitehead did some harm at your trial.’ Whether Whitehead had or hadn’t done that, he still stood in the dock with us at the end of the day, he was still widely regarded as one of ours, and no attack on him could go unremarked because it would reflect on the rest of us.

  The twins themselves could count on dozens of people throughout the prison system to stand up for their name – even people they didn’t know and people who would act anonymously on their behalf. One con called Trevor Rogers, who was at Parkhurst, mistook the twins for soft touches and was overheard describing them as ‘a pair of mugs’. One day after his release, he was walking along the road in north London somewhere when he was suddenly shot in the leg. A stranger said to him, ‘The pair of mugs send their regards,’ and disappeared. The twins had nothing to do with it, but there were a lot of people in and out of prisons who wouldn’t hear a wrong word said about them.

  Several times, I talked to men in the nick who ended up murdering other cons in there. There was no way to survive that sort of environment without being a bit naughty. We had to think in a wicked way, to be aware that someone was always likely to take a pop at us.

  Cons are the greatest hypocrites there are. They’d put the knife in the minute you turned your back. But it was rare for anyone to issue a direct challenge to Chris or me. Occasionally, we would sense from someone’s attitude or little remarks that they were trying us out, and we’d have to stamp on that as quickly as possible. If violence was necessary, then, as Chris showed in Maidstone, we’d use it.

  For the most part everybody knew their place, we didn’t feel we had to exert our authority, and we got along wi
th the other cons on equal terms. We were all in the same boat together, after all. And the way we lived reflected that. As long-term prisoners we had no time for tobacco baroning, for example. We had dealings in the gambling in prison, but tobacco baroning – selling tobacco to other cons at an inflated price – we looked upon as a very petty thing. If a man didn’t have a smoke, you’d help him out. If you borrowed an ounce of tobacco, you returned an ounce. You wouldn’t be expected to give back an ounce and a half, which was the racket in short-term prisons. We had a certain consideration for fellow-lifers. In turn, the long-term prisoners’ predicament was treated with respect by cons in more fortunate circumstances.

  No one ever talked about his own parole in front of a lifer who had no release date. Even the screws avoided mentioning your time. I remember one day in the mid-seventies in Gartree prison when Chris, Ronnie Bender and I were talking to Bobby Welch, one of the Great Train Robbers. Bobby was very well liked, and we were all concerned about the problems he was having with his knees: he suffered from very bad cartilage trouble. On this day, we were asking how he was when the Chief Officer and the Governor came along to tell him that they had good news. He knew what it would be: that his parole had come through. But instead of asking about it straightaway, he said to the Chief: ‘Don’t say anything in front of these boys here. They’re all doing life.’ I’ll never forget that, and I’ll always wish Bobby well.

  Surprising as it may seem, we had to stamp on the screws more than we ever did on the other cons. Violence was rarely used, although when it did break out, it was heavy. What confrontations we had were more to do with attitude. The screws could make your life very awkward if they wanted to. We had to let them know, ‘Don’t fuck about with us, ’cause we’ll fuck about with you.’ I’ve seen fire bombs left in the workshops. I’ve seen tools disappear. We had to make life just as difficult for them as they did for us.

  Sometimes they could be sneaky, seeking out information from those prisoners who were likely to give it. At the same time, they often couldn’t help using that information to stir up trouble.

  They’d go to cons and say, ‘Let us know about anything going on, any little plots,’ and it was an easy matter for the grasses to slip notes into the prison postbox. There was one of these boxes on each wing. All of the outgoing mail had to be censored, so any internal note was immediately discovered. Certain cons used this deal with the screws to try for a transfer. In the guise of posting a letter, some prisoner might put in a note saying, ‘I’m being threatened by the Lambrianous. If I don’t get a move from the wing, I’m sure something’s going to happen.’ They knew that, by dropping our name, their cases would seem extremely serious. But the screws were the first people to let us know who was saying what, and we’d then have to give the offending con a smack in the mouth.

  Mostly, though, the screws’ attempts to infuriate us were simply wind-ups, which we ignored. We often arrived at new prisons to be told that this person or that person, who was thought to be an enemy of ours, was an inmate. We never showed the authorities we had any bad feeling towards anyone – even if we had.

  The first person to greet me at Leicester prison in 1969 was Charlie Richardson. He came over and shook hands to show the screws there was no ill feeling. Half an hour later, I was warned to ‘be careful about the sugar because someone might have put grated glass in it’ – another ridiculous reference to Charlie. In the years to follow, we served a lot of time together, Charlie and I.

  The same sort of thing happened again at Gartree prison in the seventies when Chris and I were called up by the Governor and told that George Ince was coming. He was a villain who became a household name over his affair with Charlie Kray’s wife Dolly. It was a little test to see what Chris and I would do. Of course, we showed no reaction.

  I never encouraged screws to talk to me. It wouldn’t have been right, given my attitude to the prison system throughout most of my sentence. If things weren’t running the way we liked them, then we’d make sure the screws didn’t go home of a night. We’d make something happen to keep them there. We’d refuse to bang up until it was sorted out. They had to adapt to our way of thinking. If we wanted a certain person off the wing, or if a particular screw was giving the cons a lot of pressure, a deputation would be made to the Assistant Governor or the Principal Officer. The officers didn’t want the aggro. They knew they were dealing with very unpredictable people, and they usually transferred the person we were complaining about to another part of the prison.

  If a major problem was going to arise in the nick, there would sometimes be an undercurrent, a series of little incidents leading up to the big one. You might get a screw being assaulted, or the men refusing to go to work. Day-to-day problems we dealt with as they arose. For example, during my second stay at Gartree prison, around 1974, they redid the whole place but failed to put bookshelves in the cells. We wanted the shelves put in, and the authorities refused. We took everything out of our cells, all the units, and stuck them out on the landings. They soon gave in, and we got our bookshelves.

  By now, Chris and I and various other ‘top’ cons had realised that our natural aggression could be channelled into useful, rather than indiscriminate troublemaking. The whole idea was to make life as cushy as possible. For the first time in history the cons were beginning to run the nicks, and not the screws or the authorities.

  Eventually, the screws grew to respect us just as much as the other cons did. They had to come to terms with us and worked around us. The screws couldn’t run a prison, they could only try to implement the rules; and we found different ways to bend and break those rules. It became a game of cat and mouse with the screws in some ways, but we learned to understand them, even if we were understanding things they’d never tell us in so many words.

  Prisons were going through a change in the early seventies. They were now housing a different type of criminal, the ‘supercriminal’ if you like, and the sentences which the courts were starting to hand out reflected that. Eighteens, fifteens, fourteens were becoming common, and they were producing prisoners who were not going to settle down quietly to do their time. They were men without hope, who saw no reason why they shouldn’t take the law into their own hands in prison.

  So, suddenly, the authorities were sitting on a potential bomb in our long-term prisons. And it stood to reason that if the cons were kept happy, then there would be fewer problems. If a Governor came along and said, ‘They’re getting it too cushy,’ and had a crackdown, that would definitely lead to trouble. Everybody was aware of that.

  Gartree prison in the early seventies was run like a three-star hotel, a holiday camp. It was a joke. We did what we liked. The screws never interfered, unless we did something to rock the boat. The authorities liked to be able to announce that their prison was well behaved, even though ‘we’re dealing with some of the most dangerous criminals in England’.

  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.