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

by Lambrianou, Tony

  Those things apart, the television never interested me. I could not stand the soaps. If you watched those, you were classed as one of the prison sheep. There was only one thing that could drag them away from Coronation Street and that was the bell for the ‘liquid cosh’. Medical treatment would be given out at about ten to eight, and if you didn’t get there within fifteen minutes you were too late. There would be a cavalry charge when the bell went. Everyone wanted to get there first for their nightcap.

  The cons were on all sorts of pills, and you could get any authorised drug you wanted. The authorities held quite a bit of control this way: when the men were sedated, there would be less chance of violence. I was on Mogadon for a long time. And if you had a headache, you were given Valium: ‘That’ll do you good.’ Is it any wonder that men come out of prison wanting whatever uppers and downers they can get?

  Medical care in prisons was in my opinion generally very bad. Cons who reported sick were given pretty dismal treatment. Everybody tried to skive, but if you had a genuine complaint you were still treated with a great lack of interest by the doctors. I don’t think they could handle the numbers. Even after an operation, the follow-up treatment and the food you were given were absolutely disgusting. And you would usually be dismissed from a proper medical with one word: ‘Out!’

  At nine o’clock, tablets taken, we were banged up in our cells until the next morning. Then it would start all over again.

  Several years into my life sentence I realised that time had stopped meaning anything; the outside world seemed far away, unreal, despite what we watched on television. It gave us a very false picture anyway.

  We tried to lead a bit of a civilian life. I had the moustache and the long hair in the seventies, and a lot of the boys used to wear bell-bottom jeans. We tried to keep up with the trends, but it was very difficult. As far as women were concerned, I personally forgot all about that side of life.

  Visits became more and more of a strain. I never understood what my visitors were telling me about their problems outside; I couldn’t imagine myself in their position. Instead of looking forward to visits, I started to dread them. On a good morning or afternoon they could make you feel very high, but most of the time I came away with terrible headaches and I’d be down for two or three days afterwards.

  I lost interest in letters as well. None of the people who wrote to me told me anything I could relate to, and for my part I had nothing interesting to say in any of my replies. I was living in a completely different world. Our wages, for example, were out of touch with anything approaching reality, and the things we could buy, and chose to buy, from the canteen would have caused no great excitement outside. Who else but us would want to celebrate the news that we were going to be allowed to buy our own toiletries instead of having to use prison soap?

  Cleanliness is a number one priority among cons in long-term prisons, and Gartree was spotlessly clean. So were its inmates. That was one thing all lifers had in common: you always left the washbasin and the shower clean, and you always had to have access to water. We were continually washing.

  The majority of cons had a lot in common, especially the fact that we all hated the system, and for most of the time we coexisted in an atmosphere of uneasy peace. Everybody used to watch everybody else, we all paid attention to the prison grapevine – which was better than a newspaper – and we all knew each other in a roundabout way. But they were not necessarily the people you’d choose to have living next door in an ideal world, and the peace could give way to explosions within seconds.

  Much of this was to do with the pressures and limitations of prison life; and brothers were not exempt. Chris and I had bust-ups in every prison we were in together. The other cons used to think we were killing each other in the cell, but they knew better than to interfere. It was a release. There came times when we were sick of the sight of each other; we’d have a massive argument over something trivial, and afterwards we wouldn’t speak for months. But even during these periods Chris would be there for me if there was trouble. No one could have had a better ally.

  Quite a few of my arguments with Chris were over his tendency to trust people before he knew for a fact they were trustworthy. He’d say, ‘So and so’s a nice fella,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, but …’ And we’d have a blazing row. I was more selective: I tended to stick closely to my own circle of friends, and I spent most of my leisure time chatting with them over a cup of tea or having a game of cards. From time to time we’d have a game of snooker, or go to the gym and lift a few weights. Fitness and sports were greatly encouraged in prison, and the educational facilities were good, although A-men were not allowed to take courses unless the security was watertight, because civilian tutors were involved and the authorities were always worried about the prospect of hostage-taking.

  Many inmates couldn’t read or write, but at the same time I knew men who came out with Open University honours degrees. There were a lot of talented people in prison – cons who were skilled in carpentry, crafts, music and art – and it made me wonder half the time what they were doing in there.

  However, it must be said that the dispersal prisons were more than anything else schools and universities of crime, and as such they gave an education second to none. There were young fellas in there learning their trade by association with professionals and making contacts for the future. The professionals, amongst themselves, would put their criminal brains together to plan in every detail the jobs they would do when they came out. Occasionally they would put their brains together for some more immediately rewarding projects.

  When I first went to Gartree, there was a spate of hooch-brewing going on at the time. It was punch made out of fruit and a bit of yeast, and it always seemed to turn out green. It tasted like garbage and we used to call it Gut Rot. Some of the cons were experts and we knew we could rely on them for a good brew, but most of us had a go ourselves. We’d nick a bit of yeast out of the kitchen, along with potatoes or dried fruit, and buy a kilo of sugar and tinned fruit from the prison canteen. We’d get tepid water, and we’d brew the mixture in a plastic bucket. The secret was the amount of sugar you put in it. After about twenty-four hours, the smell of it would be all over the nick. We used to get that Deep Heat cream for muscle strains and rub it everywhere to try and hide the smell of the hooch. And we’d use a decoy. We’d make three buckets and we’d let them find one. The other two would be stashed.

  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 brimmin
g 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.