Standing in the dock with me was my brother Frankie, Old Frank the driver and Neil. I asked them if they were OK and if they knew who the grass was, but at that stage nobody had a clue.
We were remanded in custody at Brixton prison until the next hearing. I was placed on a different wing for a time, as I’d been booked as high security. That was a real pain, as it meant I had a screw following me everywhere I went. He wrote everything I did in a little book; he even took notes about how many times I went for a shit. My clothes were kept outside my cell, as some sort of security measure, and a red light stayed on in there all night.
It was a great relief when they finally allowed me to mix with my brother and the rest of the firm.
During another appearance in court, my brief told me he had seen all the statements and that I would receive a copy.
‘Who is the grass?’ I demanded to know. ‘Who is the fucking rat?’
My brief looked away, because he knew that to grass in our world was to plumb the very depths of the sewer. But that’s not the way his sort thought or spoke. ‘If you mean who is the prosecution’s chief witness against you…’ He took a deep breath, looked straight at me and said, ‘It was Ernie.’
I felt my face twisting with hate. All the work we’d done, all of the conversations we’d had, all the planning and all of the raids. The bastard had told them everything!
Ernie was a marked man from then on, but we also heard that his family was on police protection around the clock. How were we going to get to Ernie and persuade him to change his statement?
The grim truth was that the Old Bill had already interviewed Ernie, before our arrival at his house, and obtained exact details about our operation. Ernie had told them all about my activities and really stitched me up. He had chapter and verse on my armed robberies and sang like a canary – just as the copper said. The Old Bill had heard about Ernie’s firearms and explosives; he decided to tell all and make a deal for a shorter sentence.
I muttered to myself that I’d never been happy with Ernie. He used to buy drinks and all that, but I’d always had a gut feeling about him. I’d said to the others that I wasn’t happy, but I had nothing concrete to go on so we’d kept dealing with him. Taking all of that into account, no one in the firm thought for one minute that he would spill the beans. You just don’t do that when you work for a firm.
The only chance I had of getting near him was when we went to court, so I made a plan. I knew the prison officers had a routine where they brought me and the main parties up first, then some others behind us, and Ernie last of all on his firearms and explosives charges.
At Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court, on the day of our committal to the Old Bailey for trial, I made out that I needed to go to the loo. A court prison officer allowed me to use the toilets. I waited while my lot went up the steps, then the next lot, and then I heard Ernie’s voice talking to the prison officers.
I waited until I could hear him coming, then I opened the toilet door and ran out and hit him square on the chin. He crashed into the wall and went down like a sack of potatoes.
As he lay there, I snarled, ‘You will be my next bit of work.’
The alarm bell went and I had court prison officers all over me. I was pushed into a cell while they took care of Ernie. About half an hour later the door opened again. The hallway was full of court prison officers and police. They put handcuffs on me and took me upstairs into the dock, which was empty except for the prison officers. My co-defendants were made to stand in front of the dock while I was handcuffed to the fucking thing and surrounded by guards.
I looked up at the public gallery; it was full. Everyone had noted that I was cuffed to the dock and surrounded by guards, and I could hear them all murmuring.
The magistrate then came in and asked if it was really necessary for me to be cuffed to the dock with so many guards surrounding me. The prosecution explained that I was very violent, that I had attacked one of my co-accused in the cells, and they feared for his safety. The magistrate agreed, and all the charges were read out. I faced thirteen counts of armed robbery, thirteen charges of possession of illegal firearms and thirteen of endangering life. Unlucky 13 or what! Add to that list fourteen counts of conspiracy and they had done me for the fucking lot. No stone was left unturned and, even worse, they had really done their homework with all the evidence to prove everything. Sadly for me, they’d got their numbers right, and I stood no chance.
The magistrate listened to the prosecution and defence statements and sent us for trial to the Old Bailey.
I sat in the dock and looked at my friends on trial with me. I knew each of them had families and all of us faced lengthy prison sentences. Everyone had been loyal and believed in me. The best I could do for them was a damage limitation exercise. I had always believed that ‘Better one go than all of you’, and I knew the one they really wanted was me.
We were all sent back to Brixton prison, and that night I thought up the plan. I sent a note to each of the firm telling them all to write their statements, pointing the blame my way and to do the best deals they could with the prosecution. We were going to be found guilty anyway.
Some of the guys were grateful, although they didn’t like the idea of sending me up the river. I said I was gone anyway, thanks to the rat Ernie.
We sat in Brixton for nearly a year awaiting trial. Our families visited us every day and our briefs saw us from time to time to prepare for our trial, working out mitigating circumstances; in my case I had none, unless I wanted to plead insanity.
Eventually, the day of our trial arrived. All of us, except Ernie, were taken to the reception unit where we put on our suits to go to the Old Bailey. It was the first time for the rest of them, but of course I had been there before, when I was much younger, for carrying a sawn-off shotgun. I remembered that was when I’d met the Krays.
The old place reeked of history: not only the Krays’ trial, but the Richardson gang trial, the Ruth Ellis case and a lot more. Many people had gone to the gallows from the Old Bailey. It was built on the site of Newgate prison, and centuries of pain and misery seeped through every brick in its cells.
I had a feeling of foreboding as we entered the building. The Statue of Justice weighed heavily against any villain who stood in its docks.
As they led us up the staircase that led to the dock, I could see my men looking at one another. They had no idea what to expect at the top of the stairs, but I knew the layout and didn’t give a fuck. I’d seen it all before.
At the top of the stairs was the courtroom, with the judge and barristers dressed in their ritual garb as if ready to perform in some Shakespearean play. At the end of it all there would be a human sacrifice: us.
We all sat in the dock and the judge appeared. We were all told to stand up and sit down. I remembered a childhood song about standing up, sitting down and keeping moving and started to laugh.
‘Do you find this funny, Mr Cummines?’
‘No, Your Honour. It’s nerves,’ I lied.
I could see that comment was not believed, and I mumbled to myself, ‘There you are dressed in stockings, wearing a wig and a red robe, and you expect me to take you fucking seriously.’
It was like looking at an old Jacobean transvestite. The difference was that this weirdo could send me to prison for thirty years, so I bit my lip. It was best not to wind up the beak too much.
Our family and friends sat in the public gallery, along with members of the public and law students. We made sure that our parents didn’t attend. The evidence and all that would have broken their hearts, and I was happy that they weren’t in court.
Everyone listened intently as the police gave their version of events. My name was mentioned more and more as the tales of villainy unfolded. They talked about intimidation, ruthlessness, dangerous people and disrespect for human life. The general tone went along the lines that Bobby Cummines was one bad bastard, by all accounts.
‘Hear, hear,’ I could imag
ine members of the Metropolitan Choir singing, now that they were nailing their man.
I just sat there looking up at my family and friends in the public gallery. My brother Frankie, Neil, Freddy and Old Frank, all in the dock, exchanged glances.
Then came Ernie, who sat in the dock smiling like a kid who had just won a goldfish at the fairground. He waved to me and said, ‘Hello, Bobby, I didn’t want to do you but they wanted you more than anybody else. I like you, really.’
‘Are you taking the piss?’ I barked back.
‘No, I really like you, Bobby.’
‘Well, I’m fucking glad that you don’t hate me,’ I snapped.
Everyone in the public gallery started laughing and the judge had to bring the court back to normality with the ‘Silence in court!’ stuff. He warned me not to use foul language in court, and then told Ernie to give his evidence about the armed robberies.
As expected, Ernie sang like a canary that had never sung before, describing how he’d supplied the guns for our escapades.
‘I can get you anything. I can even get you a bloody tank if you’ve got the money.’
We sniggered in the dock because we knew Ernie was a nutter who worshipped weapons and explosives. He dressed up in American Civil War uniforms and had the Union flag above his bed – with a barrel of gunpowder beneath it. In fact, Ernie the Grass had enough explosives under his bed to blow half the street away.
The Old Bill shat themselves when they saw that lot and quickly got rid of it all.
When Ernie had finished giving his evidence, the judge said, ‘I understand that you are under police protection. Do you really fear these men so much?’
‘I’m not really worried about the others, but I am sure that Bobby would shoot me.’
‘Thanks a lot, Ernie,’ I thought. ‘You’ve just added another five years to my sentence.’ The court was adjourned until the next day and we all went back to Brixton.
That night we went through the plan to blame everything on me. I said everyone should plead guilty, and I would say everyone did as I asked because they were afraid. I pointed out that there would be reduced sentences for guilty pleas, and we didn’t want the victims in the witness box talking about their recurring nightmares – I knew that guilty pleas would avoid the need for witnesses. Graphic details from those sobbing, shaking witnesses, before sentencing, weren’t going to help our cases. We all agreed that my plan was the only sensible and decent thing to do.
The next day we all appeared in court again. After we’d gone through the rigmarole of standing up and sitting down, I asked the judge if I could change my plea. I said I wished to address the court. Permission was granted.
‘Your Honour, I feel it is only right to change my plea to guilty. I am guilty of all of these offences and, out of decency, I feel it would be totally wrong for the victims of these crimes to have to recount and relive their painful experiences.
‘I wish to cause them no further pain. I do not ask for mercy, as I did not show any and don’t deserve any. However, I would ask that you take into account, when sentencing my co-defendants, that they were my men acting under my instructions. If they had not done what I told them to do, I would have shot them. Thank you. That is all I have to say.’
I saw the judge sit up and raise an eyebrow. ‘I accept your plea. Take him downstairs. I will sentence him later.’
After that, the judge listened as the barristers laid out their cases for lighter sentences, while I was described as a modern-day Genghis Khan.
The judge adjourned the case for three days before sentencing us. I told my girlfriend that I was expecting to get eighteen to twenty years, but only fifteen years if I was really lucky. The rest of the boys might expect ten to twelve, I reckoned.
I was the first up.
The judge narrowed his eyes and looked at me. He didn’t mince his words. ‘These crimes are of the most serious nature and deserve to be treated as such. You were no doubt the gang leader and the organiser of these crimes. During this trial, all I have heard is the name “Bobby Cummines”, and yet there are twelve other accused in the dock with you.’
The judge was no fool and he really let me have it. ‘I don’t believe for a moment that they went and committed these crimes just because they were afraid of you.’
Quick as a flash, my barrister waded in and said I was kind to elderly people. He told the court that, in my local pub, I would buy their first drink and pay for their Sunday lunches. That was true, although I wasn’t sure if generosity in the pub would convince the grumpy, glaring old bloke in the robes and wig.
The judge replied, ‘I am sure he is a generous man. When you do what he does for a living, you can afford to be very generous, I am sure.’
My brief sat down, I took a deep breath and the judge stared at me again.
‘I have taken into account that you changed your plea to guilty to save the victims having to relive those terrible events, and I believe that there is some humanity in you. I will reflect this in my sentencing. I will not give you the sentence I was going to give you. I will reduce it to twelve years. Take him down.’
That was a bit of a result. Twelve years on all counts, to run concurrently. It was so much better than I’d been expecting, as I’d already done all that earlier bird. The others received sentences of eight years downwards, depending on their involvement. Charlie Richardson was given twenty-five years of bird with his GBH charges for allegedly using his ‘black box’ torture treatment and all that, so I counted myself fortunate.
My destination: HMP Albany, on the Isle of Wight. High security for one of Britain’s most dangerous men. There I was, in 1978, at the age of twenty-seven, about to lose the prime years of my life. The year 1990 seemed such a long way off.
The future looked grim. Very grim.
CHAPTER TEN
THE KRAYS AND THE RICHARDSONS – ALL TOOLED UP
ALBANY WAS A frightening, frightening place, where it was easy to lose all hope for the future.
I sat alone in my cell, wondering what lay ahead. I felt no remorse for any of my activities, apart from that accidental death during the armed robbery several years earlier. I thought that, generally, my actions were justified as bits of work. As I look back now, I can see that a lot of my activities were sheer lunacy. Much of what I did was total insanity. If I could turn the clock back … who knows?
You have to remember that I was up against some really nasty people and they received what was coming to them. Of course, those villains had families and I feel sorry to have caused them so much grief. I suppose one silver lining is that because of my actions back then, I have a lot of credibility when I come to try to stop youth crime today … so I have turned that negative into a real positive.
I scanned the scanty surroundings of the small cell. It must have been around twelve feet by six feet, with lino on the floor. There was a bed, a small table and not much else. The first thing I did was to hang a picture of the Queen on my cell wall. That tradition had stayed with me since childhood, and would never change.
The window was bigger than I was used to in prison, and I peered through the bars onto the exercise yard. It was a mass of concrete with not one blade of grass in sight.
I saw an intercom gadget on the wall and pressed the button. I asked the guard in his sealed office if I could go to the toilet and the door opened electronically: only one prisoner was allowed out of his cell at a time.
This was a high-tech prison. I even had a key to lock my door. Well, there was nowhere to go apart from the normal prison areas, so no one could escape, or anything like that. My convictions, including manslaughter, ensured that I always had a cell to myself and was kept away from other inmates.
I soon became used to the system. I went down for breakfast, mopped the landing, watched TV and made as many friends as I could. There were set times for meals, and these were cooked by the prisoners. The food was brought out on trolleys and you could eat them in the TV room. You could also eat i
n your cell if you wanted some peace.
My mum never came to see me – it would have been too much for her – but my sisters and friends came to Albany. It was difficult for them to get to the Isle of Wight, because the ferry didn’t run in rough weather, and it took visitors all day to get there and back. Albany and Parkhurst were jails within jails.
I had heard that some of the Albany prisoners were receiving beatings. Everyone knew what was going on and we all refused to go back into our cells until the beatings stopped. The people in charge were making a pig’s ear of running the place. I’d heard that ‘snatch squads’ were taking prisoners away and handing out terrible treatment. They were attacking prisoners who made their lives a misery by complaining about everything, from being locked up too much to the quality of the food.
I seized my chance to get my opinion heard when a group of prison staff went on walkabout on our landing. I confronted the gaffer: ‘We want to see our people,’ I shouted. ‘They’re receiving beatings. That’s totally unacceptable, and we want to know what’s going on.’
‘Let me go!’ he responded.
I bristled with rage, grabbed hold of him and ranted about the stories of beatings. ‘You rat!’ I spat out with venom. ‘People are being taken down the block and abused.’
The governor assumed I had it in for him: ‘He’s taking me hostage!’
Well, he mentioned that word – not me – but the situation began to deteriorate.
With feelings running high on all sides the screws ganged up, and the other prisoners gathered around me. I held him by the front of his shirt and slammed him against the wall.
‘I’m the governor. Don’t you know I’m the bloody governor?’
I looked him straight in the eyes, tightened my grip, and gave him a simple message: ‘And I’m fucking violent!’ It couldn’t have been more straightforward.
That governor was far too cocky. But he knew that I meant business. One of the Irish prisoners slipped a blade into my hand.
I felt the chilling, smooth surface of the ice-cold metal. The head honcho’s eyes bulged as I held it against his cheek; I felt him tremble. The screws didn’t flinch. They stood like statues, gaping, and hardly believing that their boss was within an inch of his life.
I Am Not A Gangster Page 12
