Armed and Dangerous--This is the True Story of How I Carried Out Scotland's Biggest Bank Robbery

by James Crosbie

  For weeks afterwards deliveries to the jail were made on a daily basis, every delivery requiring prisoners’ private cash cards to be altered and the cash signed off. Then the purchase had to be recorded, in triplicate of course, and sent down to reception to be signed on to the prisoner’s property card. The lucky buyer was then marched down to the reception to sign for receipt of his purchase, sign it on to his property card, then sign it out again as ‘in use’ – all typical bureaucratic prison rigmarole. With so much work being generated, the screws should have been grateful for the overtime, so in a sense, you might say the fire benefited everybody in one way or another.

  The cons in Peterhead never did anything by halves. Even the governor was known to take things to extremes at times. Perhaps it was the ambience of the place, the underlying tension, the short tempers and routine violence in Peterhead that caused people to behave irrationally at times – I suppose there must be some sort of psychological explanation. I do know that the screws there got an extra environmental allowance because of the alleged contaminating effect of constant association with low-life cons affecting their own moral standards and personal lives.

  With so many incidents and diversions, time slipped away in Peterhead and after four or five years I came off high security and started attending education classes. I soon found myself involved in O-level examinations. I must admit that I found no difficulty with any of my subjects and quickly moved on to ONC and HNC courses in Business Studies, all of which I passed, several of them with distinction.

  Then I was offered an Open University place, which I declined as the only course left with spaces that year was mathematics, a subject I was never very good at and had never studied beyond secondary level. By this time, however, I had developed a serious interest in writing, spurred on by the success of John C, a guy in PH who had written a play that had won first prize in the annual Arthur Koestler Awards Scheme, a writing competition open to all prisoners in the UK.

  The following year, I spent most of my spare time writing, producing among other things a 90,000-word crime novel and a stage play about bent coppers. I entered these two items in the Koestler Competition and was very pleased and surprised to win first prize in both categories. My success, along with the prize money, gave me the incentive to buy a typewriter and I immersed myself in writing from then on.

  Of course, I still had work to do, but after nearly seven years I had progressed to a job in the prison stores department and things were a lot more relaxed. For one thing, I no longer had to line up in the yard every morning to be counted off, a small perk, but it made a difference to the start of each day. I had also progressed to C Hall, the so-called ‘privileged’ wing and thirty years on I am still trying to figure out just exactly what these privileges were supposed to have been.

  However, the main point in being moved to C Hall was that you were now considered trainable and were listed for possible upgrading to a less secure establishment. In the meantime, things stayed much the same as before: the same old faces surrounded you and the same old jail business just kept rolling along.

  Eventually, after eight years or so, I was told that I was to be upgraded and transferred to Saughton, the prison where my sentence had begun. My goodbyes were few and casual at that. I had always taken care not to establish any enduring friendships and the three or four long-termers I had mostly associated with were equally offhand. We exchanged addresses and phone numbers; maybe we would get in touch or run into one another again, maybe not. Two or three days after being told of my move, I was sitting in reception smelling stale from stored clothes, waiting for the bus to take me away.

  Peterhead certainly held a lot of memories for me, both good and bad; and I was glad to be moving on, but I couldn’t help looking back at the place as the prison bus drove off. I remember craning my neck to catch a last glimpse of the workshop chimney, my first sight of the jail and now, hopefully, my last. When the chimney finally disappeared behind the shoulder of a hill for the last time I thought, almost aloud, Well, that’s that. But I continued to stare in its direction for another few seconds, as if to make sure it really had gone.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Blagger on the Box

  When I arrived in Saughton, I only had about four or five years to do. Only! That’s what I mean about time being different in jail. We say ‘only’ to periods of time that would see a student through an entire university course that would qualify them in one of the professions. There was one drawback to arriving in Saughton from Peterhead: we had such a bad reputation that every screw in the place was determined to show the Peterhead gangsters, as they called us, that we were nobody special and they could keep us in our place. Almost every screw in the place made a point of picking on us, mostly just to show their colleagues that they were not going to be intimidated. In fact, more than half the cons upgraded from Peterhead actually asked to be sent back, saying that at least they knew where they stood in PH.

  I was lucky. I had my writing to keep me busy and the fact that I had been successful in the Koestler competition for the past couple of years gave me a bit of leverage in getting extra time at the education classes. I justified this time by writing a novel called Ashanti Gold, which won the Outstanding Award prize in the Koestler the following year.

  There was no doubt that facilities at Saughton were better than Peterhead. There was better access to the gym, drama classes, Alcoholics Anonymous, a chess club and even the Prison Christian Fellowship to go to in the evenings. With plenty to do, I had no problem passing the time and, when I wasn’t attending some meeting, I worked away at my writing.

  On one occasion, I thought my writing had got me into some serious trouble. It was well known among the guys that I had a typewriter in my cell, which meant that I was always being asked to write letters for someone or other. One evening this con, a Moroccan milkman who lived in Edinburgh and was serving life for murdering his wife, came into my cell with a piece of paper in his hand.

  ‘Sshhh, sshhh,’ he said and put his fingers to his lips, looking furtively around, as if he suspected someone was following him. ‘Is secret,’ he whispered. ‘Please, you don’t tell anyone?’

  ‘Come on, come on,’ I said, impatiently holding out my hand for his note. ‘Just give me the fucking letter and I’ll type it out for you.’ I didn’t have time to muck about with all this secret-service stuff.

  ‘Is secret,’ he said again. ‘You keep secret?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, pal,’ I told him. ‘Just give me the bloody letter.’ I just wanted the job done and Abdul out of the way. ‘Come on, letter!’

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘You write for me, please.’

  This letter went along the lines of:

  Dear Governor and Chaplain

  I am sorry. I kill my wife and now she is in heaven. I feel bad about this and I want to be with her again. I go to be with her now. No blame for you or anyone. I just want to be with my wife.

  Abdul

  What a load of shite, I said to myself, dashing it off and handing the finished letter back to him. ‘There you go, Abdul. That do you?’

  ‘Thank you, thank you. You good man. I remember you in heaven.’

  Aye right, fucking idiot, I thought to myself. I went back to my own work, totally dismissing the incident from my mind. Then a few days later, around two in the morning, I was awakened from my sleep by noise and flashing blue lights outside my window. When I got up to look at the commotion, I saw an ambulance with paramedics unloading oxygen equipment from it.

  Jesus Christ, I thought to myself. He’s only gone and done it! Then a terrible thought struck me: the note. The bloody suicide note. I was the only con in the jail with a typewriter. ‘Oh fuck!’ I said aloud, with no thought for the demented Moroccan. ‘They’ll take my typewriter away.’ I listened at my door to the sounds in the hall, feet pounding upstairs, keys rattling, doors opening, then a stretcher rushing past and the ambulance taking off.

  At morning slop-ou
t, I emerged from my cell waiting to be pounced on and hustled away to the cells. Then I spotted the Moroccan, large as life and emptying out his piss-pot. What a relief! It wasn’t him and my machine was safe.

  It later transpired that one of the men in a two-man cell had assaulted his cell mate with a metal chair so severely that he had caused permanent brain damage. Prison black humour raised its head and the story went round that the injured guy had been reading one of my stories out aloud and his cellmate hit him with the chair to shut him up. A pack of lies, of course! But I made up my mind about one thing: no more suicide notes from me!

  Shortly after that, the governor sent for me and asked if I would be willing to appear on a BBC2 television programme called Bookmark and be interviewed about my writing. Of course, I was delighted. As a result of this, I was moved on to the semi-open conditions of Dungavel Prison out in the sticks near Strathaven in Lanarkshire, a cynical move to make things look good for the television people.

  When I got to Dungavel, I found that the governor was a pompous, self-important, fat little prat. He loved the idea of the cameras in his prison, but he didn’t like a con being the star of the show. And it really bugged him that because of the forthcoming TV appearance he had to be seen to be encouraging me in my writing. In actual fact, the fat little bastard was as awkward as he could be, telling me that he didn’t consider my writing to be work and insisting that I scrub a flight of stairs every day before he would allow me to ‘play’, as he put it, with my typewriter.

  On top of that I taught myself to type Braille and did lots of bits and pieces like knitting patterns, instructions booklets and even a restaurant menu for the local blind – all good PR stuff for the jail. Then, to top it off and prove my work had value, I won another Koestler Award with a crime thriller – The Golden Stool – an action-packed sequel to Ashanti Gold. So I earned and justified my time spent on writing. And that little prat hated every minute of it.

  Some months later, the BBC team appeared at Dungavel and I did my stuff. They filmed me scrubbing the stairs, eating my dinner, working out in the gym and jogging, all wonderful PR for the Scottish Prison Department. Finally, they had me typing away in my ‘office’, a converted toilet, as I informed the presenter. Apparently I made a good subject and they were pleased with the show. The show’s presenter, the literary critic Ian Hamilton, made the comment, ‘Crosbie’s writing is as good as and shows at least as much ingenuity as the average crime writer today.’ High praise indeed from Mr Hamilton.

  I was actually naive enough to expect a rush of offers after the show was broadcast, but nothing developed. All I ended up with was a bit of publicity, two large bars of chocolate and £25 for my co-operation. But I really enjoyed making the show and when it was screened the whole jail turned out to watch it on TV. What they were actually looking for was to see whether or not I was a creep, handing out thanks to the jail and the governor and all the staff for their help. But I didn’t let the chaps down, getting laughs and cheers when I brought out the fact that the governor had made me work in a toilet and more when I reported that I received no help at all from the prison, having to scrub stairs to earn time to write and even buy my own writing paper. The show went down well with everyone, except the governor who stayed out of the jail in a huff for the two days it took them to make the programme.

  If I got nothing else out of the television programme, it at least got me away from closed conditions and into a semi-open nick. I spent the next couple of years in Dungavel before finally being offered a place in the Training for Freedom (TFF) hostel attached to Perth Prison. I quite liked the idea of that and packed my kit for the move, heading north again. Fat Prat had another last dig at me by sending me to Perth under escort in the back of the laundry van. Normally any prisoner moving on to TFF gets an automatic six-day home leave and reports directly back to the TFF hostel. But that guy definitely held a personal grudge against me – and he’s the only member of prison staff I’ve ever said that about.

  So, after about twelve years, I was on the last leg of my twenty and starting my Training for Freedom. Sure it sounds great, but in reality all it means is that you get turfed out of the hostel at half past seven every morning with a packed lunch of cheese sandwiches and orders to report to some menial job, where you are expected to know your place and be grateful for the opportunity. I didn’t like it very much. In theory, it sounds great; in practice, it is not for real long-termers, guys who have served periods of ten or twelve years inside and have forgotten what it is to work properly. It’s impossible to simply shake off the lethargy of doing time and leap overnight into a normal work routine. The first day or so, maybe even the first week, is a bit of a novelty, but then you begin to notice that the week seems to be going on forever. Then you realise that your late morning start, with its long, lazy tea break, exercise period and two-hour lunch, has been swapped for what seems a straight eight-hour shift of hard graft.

  Every day seems like a week and a month is just too long to think about. It’s like looking at time through the wrong end of a telescope, the exact opposite of doing time inside where your days are compressed and broken up into short periods of activity. Believe me, it’s a struggle both mentally and physically to get through TFF.

  And time isn’t the only problem facing a prospective long-term release. Things that a normal person takes for granted caused me unexpected embarrassing moments, like handling cash and getting confused over decimal currency. I remember going into a cake shop on my way back to the jail after my first day of work on TFF, very conscious of the fact that this would be my first cash purchase for over twelve years.

  I remember trying to be casual, offhand even, as I rapped out my order: two chocolate éclairs, two pineapple cakes, a couple of empire biscuits and an apple tart. I handed the lady behind the counter a pound note, confidently expecting change back. I flushed red with embarrassment when she asked for more money and suddenly felt everyone in the shop was staring at me and knew exactly who and what I was as I stuttered back at the shop assistant and changed my order to a packet of chocolate biscuits.

  There was this one particular guy who put things into perspective: the ubiquitous Walter E. Now Walter had just served a full fourteen years out of a twenty-one-year sentence for armed robbery and barely three months after his release found himself back in the High Court again on a similar charge. Found guilty, he was asked by the judge if he had anything to say in mitigation before sentence was handed down. Indeed, Walter had plenty to say.

  He told the judge that he had been released after fourteen years in Peterhead Prison without so much as one day’s preparation for the outside world. He said that he had never received any trade training and in all that time he hadn’t seen a tree or a dog or a child. The whole world had moved on; even the district where he lived had been rebuilt and, when he had asked the governor to supply him with a map, his request was denied. He was released after fourteen years with just a travel warrant and one week’s social-security money with which to begin a new life.

  Once on the outside, he had felt totally disorientated and completely out of touch. Decimal currency was a complete mystery to him, traffic a total hazard. And when he ran after a corporation bus and tried to jump on board, he bounced off the back because they had moved the doors to the front. In an alien world, unemployed and unemployable, he had simply drifted back into crime and now found himself in front of the court again.

  The judge was rather sceptical about these allegations and told Walter that he had intended handing down a severe sentence. However, having listened to him speak, he decided to defer sentence until he had looked into the matter. On Walter’s return to court a few days later, the judge told him that he had been shocked to discover that everything he had said was true. After announcing his disapproval of the Prison Service and deploring its total lack of any pre-release training for Walter, the judge, almost apologetically, sentenced him to a minimum term of three years.

  I was out on t
he exercise yard in Saughton the day Walter returned from court. Everyone had tipped him for a twelve, a ten at the very least, but there he was smiling all over his face and shouting out the window at me, ‘Got a three, Bing. I’ll be out before you!’ And so he was. But I had the last laugh, because unfortunately Walter later got a twelve-year sentence and I was actually out before him.

  The TFF did have certain perks: six hours a week free time to be taken in the evenings or over the weekend and the luxury of a full weekend home leave once a month. That was probably the only thing that made TFF bearable for the likes of myself. But it was a double-edged sword: returning to the hostel after a weekend leave once a month was like getting captured all over again – sheer torture.

  I had long since been divorced and my ex-wife was staying in my house in Bishopbriggs. I found myself spending my weekends with Mum. Fifty years of age and back at Mum’s! Thank God for her and God bless her too, because I really don’t know how I would have managed if she hadn’t been there for me. But it was nice to get out now and relax at home again, knowing that it would soon all be over.

  I was eventually given eight months’ parole, getting liberated from Perth TFF hostel one bright morning as casually as a man who had just paid a fine. With around £20 in my pocket, plus the discharge grant of £38, I was set to face the world again, hoping that I wouldn’t bounce off any buses along the way.

  Did the TFF work? Well, that’s another story.

  Afterword

  Iceland Can Wait

  So there I was, a free man. I had worked my way through the system and now my hope was of new horizons. While in prison, I had sent a book out to a publishing company. Now, some five years later, my life story is published – not the typescript I originally sent and not by the publisher I sent that first typescript to, but published nevertheless.