About three weeks later, around 3.00 am, I was in my bed in my room at my parents’ house when suddenly there was a terrific pounding at the front door. The lock must have burst open just as I leaped out of bed, because I was only halfway across the room when a whole army of cops descended on me and I was battered to the floor and had my hands cuffed behind my back.
Half conscious and in a state of shock, all I could see were huge black shadows looming over me. What the fuck was going on? Practically naked in just my underwear, I was half-carried, half-frogmarched across the hall, past my protesting parents and out the front door. I could hear my mother’s voice rising as she shouted at the police. I don’t know what it was she said, but I can still hear the copper’s reply above the tumult: ‘Murder, Mrs, that’s what he’s done! Bloody murder! He’s killed three policemen!’
I can imagine the shock my mother must have felt. Fuck me, I was pretty stunned myself. Murder! Bloody murder! He’s killed three policemen! What were they on about? My mind went ballistic as I was carried triumphantly downstairs listening to the cops congratulating each other on my capture.
When I was dragged into an interrogation room in the police station, there was a huge reception committee waiting for me. I was still barefoot and in my underpants and feeling very vulnerable.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘Going on? What’s going on?’ A very angry detective was glaring into my face. ‘You’re what’s going on, you murdering bastard!’ I could see he was straining to avoid striking me. ‘Fucking police killer!’
But by now I’d had a chance to think and I actually felt a weight lift from me. I knew this was a mistake. There was no way I was connected to a murder, any murder, never mind the murder of three cops. I let my breath go and relaxed. ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.
‘Don’t get smart with me, Crosbie. You’re going the whole road for this. Don’t you worry about that. The whole fucking road!’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘Murder? Three policemen? You must be off your head.’ I stood central in the room, focus of a dozen pairs of angry eyes. ‘It’s madness. I haven’t murdered anyone.’
I caught the eye of another policeman who was giving me a calculating look and held out both hands. ‘Honest,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about.’
It was my demeanour that had caught Detective Inspector Michie’s interest; I was too calm for a man who had just been accused of murdering three policemen. ‘Where were you yesterday, James?’ he asked me.
Where was I? Where the fuck was I? I had to think for a moment. Oh, yes – it came to me. ‘I was in Easterhouse [a housing estate in Glasgow]. I was selling door-to-door. I was there all day.’
It was easy to check. Within half an hour my order book, along with a pair of shoes and some clothes for me, were brought from my parents’ house and I was identifying a list of yesterday’s customers. The police were particularly interested in any calls or sales I had made around midday. By seven in the morning, three worried-looking customers of mine filed into the room. One by one they identified me as the man who had sold them door grilles the day before. There was no question about it: I had been in Easterhouse at the time the three policemen had been shot.
You’d think that the police would have been happy to clear me, perhaps even apologise a little. But no! The air of disappointment was almost palpable as they let me go, a reluctant offer of a lift home coming almost as an afterthought. By eight o’clock I was letting myself back into my parents’ house. They had both been up all night, my father so upset that for one of the very few times in his life he had been unable to go to work. My mother was shattered, a complete bundle of nerves and frantic with worry as all sorts of terrible thoughts raced through her mind. Yet here I was, a few hours after being dragged away like a rabid dog, back home as if nothing had happened. It was an experience for everyone.
What had happened was that on 17 August 1966, three men – my old pal Jack Witney, his mate Harry Roberts (an ex-soldier he had teamed up with) and John Duddy, a total stranger to me, had been intercepted by three Flying Squad officers near Wormwood Scrubs. They had resisted arrest, pulled out guns and shot the policemen, leaving them dead in the street. Jack had been traced almost immediately through his car registration number and arrested.
Harry Roberts had disappeared and all the police knew about the third man was that he was ‘a Scotsman from Glasgow’. As Jack had been my co-defendant at the Old Bailey in 1960 for conspiracy to rob and I was from Glasgow, the police had put two and two together and got five. But just supposing I had been in London, or having a quiet day to myself somewhere without any witnesses? It’s happened before and no doubt it will happen again. John Duddy was arrested at a house in Gallowgate, Glasgow a few weeks later and charged with the murders.
I took time off myself that day, contemplating the telegrams I had received and thanking my lucky stars I had avoided the ‘urgent business pending’ summons. I don’t know what Jack and co had been up to that day, or why the cops had tackled them, but after a trial at the Old Bailey, the three of them were sentenced to life imprisonment, with the judge’s recommendation that they serve a minimum of thirty years before being considered for release. John Duddy, the man I had been mistaken for, died in prison of natural causes about ten years later. Jack got out after serving twenty-seven years and was murdered by person or persons unknown after about three months of freedom. Harry Roberts, after thirty-six years, was ready for release and marriage. As recently as May 2002, he was moved from open conditions back to a closed prison for matters of security. He doesn’t have a lot of hope.
So it was back to work for me and, although I was completely innocent of the cop killing, I still felt a tremendous sense of relief that I was free to go about my business. And business was good. Not only were the door grilles going well, but I was also doing a brisk trade in stolen goods. Earlier in the year, I had been introduced to a dispatcher at a large British Road Service parcel depot. All this guy had to do was pick a likely package and redirect it to a different address. What I had to do was get large labels printed on gummed paper so that the dispatcher could stick them over the original delivery address. A fresh line was added to the driver’s delivery sheet and that was that. The driver knew nothing about the scheme and I would be waiting at the drop to accept delivery. It was as easy as that.
However, there was one slight problem: neither the dispatcher nor I knew for certain what the contents of the redirected package were. He could only make a half-educated guess by seeing where the package was originally addressed. Most of the time it worked out and I got stuff I could easily sell. But quite often I’d open an attractive-looking crate to find a huge amount of useless crap. Once, for example, I took delivery of a huge crate that turned out to hold thousands of worthless (from our point of view) coloured plant-pot holders. The useless stuff still had to be disposed of and I tipped this particular delivery into the Forth and Clyde Canal. I don’t know why, but I fully expected them to sink out of sight below the murky waters. But no – instead of sinking, the pot holders gradually spread across the water, filling the canal from bank to bank like a gigantic plantation of brilliantly coloured water lilies. I just stared at the scene and smiled. It certainly brightened up the canal and I knew it would pose another colourful mystery for the Glasgow Police to ponder over.
So, with one thing and another, time slipped past and before I knew it the wedding date came round. We were married in the Barony Church in High Street, the oldest church in Glasgow, on 5 November 1966. The entire day was a success and the party was still going strong when Margaret and I slipped away. We spent our wedding night in a Glasgow hotel and flew out the next morning to enjoy our honeymoon in Ireland.
When we flew back from Dublin at the end of our honeymoon, I had about £7 left in the world and it did not worry me in the least! I had Weldart Door Grilles and I was confident that, even if I was totally ski
nt, I could go out any day or night of the week and come home with cash: I always did well selling door-to-door. So well, in fact, that a few months after my wedding, I moved into much larger premises and began a new line of work.
Chapter Twenty
Twelve-gauge Action
Luxafire Surrounds: that was the new name and fire surrounds were the new game. Open coal fireplaces were on their way out and, with all the new properties having built-in central heating, everyone was buying modern wooden fire surrounds. There was plenty of room for competition and I decided to get into them myself. I had my new, larger workshop in Adamswell Street and I soon got a joiner and another guy in to work for me.
The surrounds turned out to be a good idea and, along with the little bits and bobs of villainy that turned up, the latter end of the sixties were a good time for me. Of course, a lot of the stuff I got involved in then was pretty low key and is now forgotten in the mists of time, but every now and again something really serious would turn up and there’s a chance the books have never been closed on them. I don’t think it would be very clever of me to say too much about what I got up to then. I was never caught and, with no statute of limitations in this country, some righteous copper might decide to go on a mission against me even now.
As I’ve mentioned before, I was never impressed by the quality of criminal up here. You would have all these guys perfectly willing to pull out razors, knives and bayonets, prepared to fight to the death and risk years in prison over the result of a football match or a spilled drink; but suggest a bit of real villainy and they would mutter and mumble, even pretend to consider it, until it came to the crunch, the moment of commitment as I call it. It was then that their bottle went and they didn’t want to know.
There was one guy, I’ll call him John T, who spoke a good line and I took him on a robbery. Everything was going well – we had picked up a car and all we had to do was wait on delivery of the money. As we sat in the stolen car waiting for the money to be delivered, I noticed John getting more and more fidgety, then finally lapsing into an uncharacteristic silence. I put it down to nerves; I sometimes suffered from them myself. Then the security van drove up and the men made the delivery and drove off. The money was there.
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
At the very last second, just as we were about to enter the premises, this hard case baulked and turned away. I literally had to grab his jacket and pull him into the office with me. Fair enough, once inside he was OK – I only needed him for a minder anyway. I jumped the counter and grabbed the bag and that was that. Afterwards you would have thought we had done the Brinks Mat job, the way he strutted around bragging about his achievement. I never worked with him again.
Then there was the whisky lorry. This guy knew a driver who was willing to let us take his lorry and leave him tied up somewhere. I immediately got on the phone to Les, a pal of mine in London, who I knew could handle the load. ‘When can you get it?’ he asked me.
‘Whenever you want, Les. He’s on the same run every day.’
‘Sort it out for next Thursday, James. I’ll have a lorry and papers for the load ready and up there by then.’
‘OK,’ says I. ‘Next Thursday. Good. I’ll be ready.’
I duly passed on this information to the lorry driver and we arranged the ‘hijack’ for the following Thursday. Everything was looking good. But on Tuesday I was grafting away in the workshop when who should appear but the lorry driver. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘It’s outside.’ I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach.
‘What’s outside?’ I already knew, but I was hoping for a miracle. Surely he wasn’t this stupid?
‘The lorry,’ he told me, as if I was the one who was daft. ‘The whisky.’
‘But you’re not supposed to be here until Thursday!’
‘Ach! Thursday, Friday, Tuesday, what’s the difference? If you can sell it on Thursday, you can sell it anytime, surely?’
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘It’s set up for Thursday, not fucking Tuesday! You’ll have to carry on to the bond with it.’
‘Too late for that, pal,’ he told me. ‘I’m off my route now and well behind schedule.’
‘Well, get back on your route and make an excuse. Say you broke down or something.’
‘So you’re not taking it then?’
‘How the fuck can I take it. Where the fuck am I going to put it? I told you, it’s been set up for Thursday.’
‘Ach! All you fucking wide men are the same. Big talk, no action.’
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Fuck off. Fuck off, you stupid bastard.’ I just shook my head in frustration as I watched him drive off out of sight.
That was the sort of criminal mentality I kept running up against in Glasgow. I had to phone Les in London and tell him the deal was off. Naturally he was very pissed off about it. After all, he had put himself about arranging transport and documents to get the whisky down south, no doubt spending a few quid in the process. Now it was all off. I couldn’t blame him for being angry. I wasn’t too happy myself. If that idiot lorry driver had turned up on time, we would all have had a good earner.
I suppose I should have stuck to full-time legitimate business. But among all the dross, a diamond occasionally surfaced. That’s what happened when George Noble approached me one night in the pub. It took the usual format: a pal of his, a painter, was working temporarily in a travel agent’s in the town centre. The painter started work an hour before the agency staff and had a key to let himself in. He was always there when the staff opened up for business and had spotted that there was a lot of money held in the safe behind the foreign-exchange counter. He was suggesting that I go into the place and either steal the safe or blow it open. The tale was interesting and it passed my first test: how do you know that? And it did make sense. Main travel agencies always had a foreign-exchange service and that meant cash on the premises. Yes, it sounded good to me and I decided to speak to his pal.
The painter’s tale was good and I liked the way he told it. No glowing exaggerations, no gilding the lily, just a simple description of what he had seen, along with the admission that he didn’t know the exact amount of cash held there, but it looked a lot to him. He also told me that the counter was busy all day, changing money and issuing traveller’s cheques to a constant stream of customers. Well, he was definitely in a position to know and his story certainly made sense. I decided that it was worth taking a closer look.
I asked the painter to have a duplicate set of keys cut for me and went in one night to check out the safe. As I suspected, it was too modern to blow open but, as I hoped, it was small enough for a couple of men to manhandle on to a barrow and wheel away. I liked the idea and decided the job was on.
The obvious time to hit the place was around eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. The painter, on a five-day week, would be off and at that time in the morning the streets would be busy enough. No one would be likely to pay any attention to a couple of workmen wheeling a barrow across the pavement. Once I explained the set-up, I had no trouble recruiting a willing assistant. All I needed then was a van and a sturdy parcel barrow – both easily obtained items.
In the event, the job was a canter. We weren’t even in the place ten minutes before we had the safe loaded on to the barrow and covered under an office rug. As I suspected, no one paid any attention to us as we locked up the shop and wheeled the barrow across the pavement and lifted it, safe and all, straight into the back of our waiting van and drove off. The entire job went sweet. Mind you, opening the safe gave us a bit of a tussle. It was a solid little bastard and it took us a couple of hours with a heavy-duty angle grinder to cut through to the prize.
It turned out that there was about £15,000 in traveller’s cheques and foreign currency in the safe, along with just under £3,000 in sterling. Remember, I’m talking about 1968 here and in today’s terms it was equal to about £100,000; although it wasn’t the biggest job I’d done, I’d certainly describe it as a goo
d wee turn.
I was happy with the result and my helper was delighted to take the sterling and leave me to cash the traveller’s cheques and foreign currency for my cut. That was no problem for me: I had contacts in London who would gladly pay me half the face value of everything I had and exchange my goods for a cool £7,500. The painter got £2,500 for his help and information and I pocketed £5,000 for myself – good wages at the time.
That was actually the best earner I’d had in Glasgow up until then and it proved to me that there was good work around if only you could find out about it. So I began looking around with a criminal eye, noting vulnerable premises, checking out security, automatically glancing at my watch if I spotted money being carried across a pavement either into or out of banks or business premises. It gave me a new perspective of Glasgow, like an artist seeing the darker shades and shadows of a chosen subject. Take scaffolding round a building: an ordinary member of the public sees it as a hazard to be negotiated; a criminal sees it as a temporary opportunity to be exploited; a possible means of entry into premises that would otherwise be inaccessible. Without conscious effort we will spot a cashier hiding the high-value notes in a separate drawer, or notice a businessman leaving a bank and putting a heavy bag into the boot or rear-seat area of his car. Make no mistake; our eyes are drawn like magnets to every possible shade of weakness.
Often something will turn up right out of the blue, like the time when I was buying tickets for a European cup final in Milan. I was in a small travel agent’s, just picking up the tickets, not a criminal thought in my head, when the girl asked me if I wanted any traveller’s cheques. Traveller’s cheques? I looked beyond her desk and could see the entire floor area of the open-plan shop: not a safe in sight. Immediately my criminal hat was on. I asked for £50 worth of cheques and watched as she opened an ordinary filing cabinet and produced a thick folder. It was stuffed with traveller’s cheques in denominations from £5 to £100 and once our transaction was over, I looked on in amazement as she replaced the folder in the bottom drawer of the cabinet. This was just too good to be true.
Armed and Dangerous--This is the True Story of How I Carried Out Scotland's Biggest Bank Robbery Page 21
