Andy the Greek brought up the incident in the pub and I said, ‘It’s fucking outrageous that you can’t go out for a quiet drink and do a bit of business without some lunatic fucking stabbing you. What is this world coming to? The problem is that too many people are getting hold of blades these days.’
Everyone agreed, and then Old Frank the driver started laughing.
‘What’s going on?’ I demanded to know.
‘Well, I was just thinking about you – tools and blades and everything. It’s all a bit rich, coming from you!’
I agreed he had a point, but reminded him that I was trying to do business and not cause mayhem in a pub for no reason.
The Kray and Richardson gangs are perfect examples of how gangsters differ from criminal businessmen. Reggie, Ronnie and his thugs had the brawn, while Charlie, Eddie and the rest of the Richardson outfit had the brains. The Krays wanted the image and notoriety of being seen as hardened gangsters – the same as those portrayed in Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney movies. They had no idea about business or setting up profitable scams. They dealt in violence, thuggery and glamour.
The Richardson gang, on the other hand, was far more sophisticated in its practices, running complex frauds known as ‘long firms’. This involved building up trust with a supplier over a long period of time and always paying on the dot. Once the supplier’s confidence was sky high, a large order was placed. No cheque was handed over this time; the goods and the Richardsons disappeared, and market stalls were flooded with the latest kettles, irons and an impressive range of household goods.
The Richardsons were also involved in mineral deals in South Africa and Canada. They were far ahead of their time in the crime business. They were businessmen motivated by the desire for wealth. Charlie Richardson’s knowledge of minerals was second to none, and he had an astonishing brain for business. If he’d been born on the right side of the tracks, he would have run a multinational company, he was that good. To this day I have not come across his equal.
When I was active, the criminal businessmen were the real deal. This group wanted to get money with the least attention to themselves and their activities. That was my involvement in crime, from start to finish.
Businessmen in the crime business of the 1970s normally ran well-structured outfits, had good organisational skills and kept their activities out of sight. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, nothing dodgy could be detected. It was all about the money and not the glamorous image. On the other hand, these people were totally ruthless; if need be, they killed to remove any obstacles standing in the way of their business.
Contract killing was used by criminal businessmen as a last result to remove a problem. Firstly, they would try to ‘educate’ the person or people causing them the problem, making it clear that things had to change. If that did not work, then some serious intimidation would be employed. If that failed, then the only answer was a bullet in the back of the head.
These actions were well thought through. It was not anything personal, or done in anger. It would just be a bit of work, needed to protect the business and the operators of that business.
The true organised crime business is still operated by businessmen and criminal organisations such as the Mafia, Triads and South American drug cartels. They operate in much the same way as the organisational structure of a multinational company or government. All of these organisations – legal and illegal – have soldiers and enforcers, as well as penalties for breaking their rules.
Governments use police and armed forces to enforce their laws, and the courts to mete out the punishments. If you break their rules, you can expect heavy prison sentences. The organised crime industry maims and terrorises people who get in the way. The death penalty still exists in that world, and there is no appeal system if the offender does not agree with his sentence.
Organised crime is normally a microscopic version of what civilised countries did in the past. Take drug dealing, prostitution, people trafficking and child-labour sweat shops. Governments of many countries have been involved in dirty deeds for generations. What about the slave trade, and the little children nowadays working in horrific conditions for high-street designer stores?
Britain turned China into a nation of junkies. Yes, we traded opium for tea after we acquired huge quantities of the drug from our activities in Bengal. The Chinese banned the drug in 1729 after a huge addiction problem. But in the 1830s Britain found a way around the trade ban and flooded China with opium. The Chinese hit back by capturing many of the traders and forcing them to hand over their opium. Britain responded by sending in the navy, including a new iron warship with a rocket launcher. We ran riot, killing up to 25,000 Chinese. Many of them were in a confused state, having become addicted to our opium.
Child labour was used in the rubber and sugar plantations to fill the coffers of the powerful nations in history. Prostitution was a business run since Roman times, if not before. To enforce these trades violence, intimidation and murder were used on a massive scale. All of these acts had the blessings of each country’s rulers and governments.
Because of the availability of information on the internet and the aggressive press, governments and multinationals can no longer hide behind their veils of secrecy. More and more cases of corruption within governments and large companies are being exposed on a daily basis; one only has to look at our own politicians’ expenses scandal, and the insider dealing and money laundering within our banking system.
MPs who had repaid their mortgages continued to claim thousands of pounds in interest. Just oversights, eh? Claiming interest for a non-existent mortgage? What about the guy who claimed more than £1,600 for a floating duck house? What about another one who claimed more than two grand to have his moat cleaned? Someone else claimed more than forty grand to furnish a small flat, while a lot of these claims were disguised. They were always ‘flipping’ their second homes to claim maximum allowances and generally taking the piss.
Why was a senior Tory trying to claim more than £15,000 in expenses to pay his daughter rent for a London flat … even though he owned a home close to Westminster? When I read that another one had claimed £2,500 for treating dry rot at her partner’s home, many miles from her constituency and Westminster, my faith in the system vanished. Shouldn’t the whole lot of them have gone to jail? Would the man on the street be allowed to pay the money back and go unpunished? NO.
Things have reached such a state that people view politics as another form of organised crime. They call the House of Commons ‘the House of Conmen’ and the House of Lords ‘the House of Frauds’. Who am I to argue with that?
The majority of the public don’t trust politicians or bankers, and organised crime is now seen as not so bad after all! People say the lower classes are getting a better share of the cake by buying stolen goods that they would otherwise not be able to afford. If you talk to the average man on the street, most will say everyone is ‘at it’ – from the criminals on the street to the criminals in government and the heads of the multinationals. The working men and women believe they are the victims, paying for all of those luxurious lifestyles.
It’s a sad state of affairs, because now we have the situation of who will guard the guards? The biggest con of all is this: if politicians or police get caught with their fingers in the till, who investigates them? The Police Complaints Commission and the Crown Prosecution Service are both government bodies ruled by Parliament. A mate of mine, former criminal Paul Ferris, summed it up nicely when he told me it was the same as asking Al Capone to investigate the Mafia. It’s totally insane.
Not all politicians and police officers are bent – far from it. I have many good friends in both groups. But trust in these organisations falls away when one of their members gets caught breaking their own rules. It tars all of them with the same brush.
Honest politicians and police officers hate it when they find one of theirs has crossed over to the other side. It’s the same as the
organised crime business hating rapists, child molesters and grasses. So you can see that the crime business is not that far from a mini government, also having its own laws and codes of ethics and practices.
Crime, like everything in life, is evolving all the time. It doesn’t stand still. Nature doesn’t cater for voids. When a gang is taken out of existence, when you have a patch of weeds and they’re taken out, other vegetation grows in. That applies to gangers and criminal businessmen.
While the gangsters are brawling in the pubs, criminal brains are checking out the latest security systems. As soon as one arrives on the market, criminal geniuses will find a way around it. Then a security company brings out another, more sophisticated system to keep robbers out. That one is studied in the greatest detail too, until a way is found around it … and the evolution of crime goes up another step in the ladder, while the gangsters keep brawling.
Criminals with an eye for business are now experts in computer fraud, smuggling techniques and state-of-the-art weapons. If anything new comes out to give the business a boost, they will acquire it. They’ll buy the thing and pull it apart.
Even as I write this, I’m reading about criminals – not gangsters – using 3D printers to develop weapons. It seems you can make plastic guns that fire live rounds. I imagine that a plastic gun would be a nightmare to detect at an airport.
Gangsters and businessmen on a local level will never get away with anything much today. Nowadays, if you want to get into crime, you have to be a head case. There is so much against you, including the police intelligence system. They can even trace your credit cards and see how you spend your money. The only people who do crime now are people who are really desperate to put food on the table. They usually have alcohol or drug problems, or mental health issues. The real organised criminals nowadays are sophisticated, like the police.
The crime business, though it may seem glamorous to the outsider, has a much darker side. It is full of nightmares and casualties and destroys the beauty of all we hold sacred in a civilised society. I was involved in a nightmare world with glitter thrown in to make it appear more desirable.
My realities began where other people’s nightmares ended. The man in the street went to sleep with a dream under his pillow; I went to sleep with a gun under mine.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WOMEN, WOMEN AND MORE WOMEN
THE ACTIVITIES OF bad boys attract a certain type of female. These women dress sexily and are easily influenced and star-struck by the criminal’s lifestyle. But they have little knowledge of how real organised crime operates, and are sucked into a world full of thuggery and illusions.
In my day there were set rules when you went out. You turned up at a pub or club, and your girl sat with her friends while the guys were left alone to talk about business. The females all knew each other. The girls discussed the new things we’d bought them or who was engaged or pregnant and all that. It was a pain in the arse if one of the guys was getting married. It meant that your woman would be on your back all the time about marrying her. That meant a lot of excuses, and even more expensive presents to shut them up.
Most were sensible enough to know what they could get out of you before you went to jail; then they would move on to the next crook. We called that type ‘gangster groupies’ and treated them accordingly. They were shag machines and just something you wore on your arm.
Then there was another type of real girlfriend who you had feelings for. Everyone knew that was your woman, and a definite no-go area for the other guys. I had a few of those relationships …
I had a hippy girlfriend called Rosie, who was a weird but beautiful little thing. She was into flower power and free love and she had little flowers painted on her face. Rosie wanted me to be a hippy too so, to keep her sweet, I bought myself an Afghan coat and a headband. I looked the part when I took her to pop concerts and love-ins at Alexandra Palace.
The relationship didn’t last long because I robbed the hippies of their drug money and beat up any guy who moved in on her. I wasn’t cut out for the hippy life. Plus, Rosie was taking so many pills that she rattled as she walked, and the boys felt nervous around her. She did not click with the other girls because she wasn’t into the money scene, so we just ended up as good friends.
Then there was June. Now she was beautiful, with loads of class, and was the only girlfriend who I respected and didn’t sleep with. She came from Stoke Newington, or Stokie, which is in the Borough of Hackney in North London. Stokie has supplied the rest of the city with water from its rivers and reservoirs since the sixteenth century. And the place provided me with June. Even my mum liked her, and that was special for me.
One night I took her to the pub to meet my brothers and the rest of the firm. The guys were gobsmacked, seeing this swan amongst a bunch of pigeons.
‘Where the hell did you get her?’ Chrissie asked, trying not to look at her stunning figure. He was trying to catch sight of her legs, but this conservatively dressed beauty was showing only a glimpse below the knee.
‘Look at that hair,’ Neil said, wide eyed, as her shiny brown mane flowed perfectly down her back. A tiny black band held it all in place and just added to June’s perfect lines.
‘Look at those gorgeous brown eyes,’ Old Frank whispered, trying not to sound jealous.
‘She hardly wears any make-up,’ my brother Frankie said, leaning over to catch Tony the Greek’s attention.
‘She doesn’t need to wear any,’ Tony told him, as this elegant young lady walked gracefully to the toilets and back, looking totally gorgeous.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t a reliable boyfriend. I was always out with my mates, up to no good, while she stayed in a lot at her home. My God, she was loyal. When I got nicked for manslaughter, that girl wrote to me every week through the sentence, and I fell deeply in love with her. Up until that point, the only person who’d been loyal to me was that jewel in my crown, my mother.
I had a little picture of June on a board in my cell. One day a prisoner called Nicky, who was inside for GBH, came into my cell to talk about prison stuff. He looked at June’s photo and said, ‘She’s a bit hot, you lucky bastard. I wouldn’t mind giving her one myself.’
I saw red, jumped off the bed and battered him all around the cell. They could hear him screaming on the landing.
Terry, who was in the next cell, came running in, shouting, ‘Stop it, Bobby! The screws are coming!’
I had my fingers in Nicky’s eye sockets and was trying to pull his eyes out; I was determined to blind the bastard for looking at her that way. I was taken down the block to solitary for fighting, but after that nobody ever made crude remarks about her again.
June met someone near the end of that sentence and we parted. Everyone thought, after my release, that I would go and get her back, but I never did. June was not cut out to be involved with a criminal. I wanted to hang on to that memory, because all that faced me was a world of brutality and nightmares. Even to this day I respect her and I know that she was something decent and pure in my life.
When I wasn’t banged up in the detention centre or in prison after the manslaughter sentence, I went from one girlfriend to another. After all, I had to go without sex for years, and so when I was out I was at it like a fucking rabbit on heat. We all changed our girlfriends on a regular basis, because you couldn’t allow yourself to get too involved. At some point, you knew you would be going to jail for a long time and you couldn’t expect a woman to wait for all those years and be faithful. If it was the other way round, you wouldn’t be sitting at home knitting while she did her bird. Also, if you were on your toes – on the run – a real relationship was more of a liability than an asset.
In that world, relationships would appear to be good on the surface but underneath they had no solid foundations.
All of us were on the hunt for a pretty woman, but things didn’t always turn out the way we had intended, as Chrissy the Greek found out to his cost in the Hercules pub one night.
>
He and Andy the Greek thought they were God’s gift to women and, to be fair, they were always well turned out. If a girl just looked at them, they automatically thought she was in love with them, as was the case in the pub that night.
I was with my girlfriend at the time, having a laugh with the boys, when Chrissy said to me that he reckoned a woman sitting near us fancied him. Needless to say, Andy thought the same and they were both preening themselves, trying to catch her attention.
The lights were dim – the same as any other club or pub, so you couldn’t see the dirt and grime on the surroundings (if you saw the inside of most nightclubs in the daytime, you would never drink in them), but I could just make out that she had false-looking blonde hair, a low-cut top and plenty of bling: there were long earrings, bangles, gaudy rings and all that. The short skirt just covered her thighs, showing shapely legs all the way down to high-heeled, open-toed sandals that revealed bright red painted toenails. Tarty or what.
We watched the two Greeks swing into action. In a flash, those two dirty bastards were on either side of her. I noticed that she had a massive guy with her – obviously a minder – and he looked as if he’d been through a few wars. I imagined that he could handle himself.
I called Chrissy back and told him, ‘You be careful there. She obviously has a few quid, with all those sparklers around her neck. She’s a high society bird, out looking for a bit of rough.’
Even though I marked Chrissy’s card that she had a minder with her, he said that he ‘was well in there’ and that she loved him. Shortly afterwards, he disappeared with her and Andy came back sulking because his mate had scored and he’d had no luck. Within minutes, though, Andy had found another piece of skirt.
A few hours later it was closing time at the pub, and the place closed, but we always got ‘afters’. Around midnight, there was this frantic banging on the door and I told Big Eddie to investigate.
I Am Not A Gangster Page 9
