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.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A RIOTOUS ASSEMBLY
On 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.’
Frank said, ‘One of the perks of the job, guv, one of the perks of the job.’ His attitude was, ‘Treat me like a human being and I’ll act like a human being.’
I couldn’t have felt less like a human being in that strongbox. On the third morning I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see a screw, or anybody else, again.
Finally they came in, six of them. One had a plastic spoon, one had a plastic knife, one had a plastic fork and one had a dinner on a plastic plate. The plate was scratched and all diseased-looking. God knows what they’d done to the food. Probably they’d gobbed on it; they might have drugged it. I slapped it down on the floor.
The following morning, a doctor came to see me. He said, ‘A lot of good men died in China. Remember that.’ Then he shut the door, and that was the last I saw of him. I still haven’t fathomed what he meant by that.
The same night I was given my charge sheets. I was accused of mutiny, inciting others to mutiny, aiding and abetting escape, attempting to escape from legal custody, gross personal violence to a prison officer (two charges), assaulting a prison Governor, breaking and entering the canteen, stealing property from the canteen, damaging prison property and having an offensive weapon, which was a pole approximately four feet long.
I was in the strongbox for five days before being transferred to a normal punishment cell for two weeks on a nominal charge of assaulting a prison officer. The VC then sentenced me to fifteen months for the string of charges above. I was to serve this time in the Wormwood Scrubs control unit. This was a newly introduced form of imprisonment for cons who were impossible to control within the system. There were only two control units in the country. The other was in Wakefield.
Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror Page 23
