I Am Not A Gangster

by Bobby Cummines

  Lynn and I became very good friends because of those poems. Later, on home leave, we became romantically involved.

  Those poems came straight from the heart and reflected my circumstances at the time. When I wrote them I was an angry young man with no hope, but I did eventually see the light and make a dramatic turnaround.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CRIME

  PRISON HAD A horrendous effect on my mum. With my dad dead, and members of her family in prison, she was heartbroken. She never visited me, Freddy or Frankie. I kept in touch with my brothers, but I didn’t see them as I had to be kept in much more secure units. Mum wrote to me, and I sent her plenty of letters. My sisters used to visit me regularly, but my mum found it too difficult to go near the prison gates.

  The university of crime is a place where villains teach other villains everything they know. If a kid goes to college, he or she learns up to a certain level. If they go to university, that level increases. If they win a place at Oxford or Cambridge, the standard increases even more. It’s very similar in the prison system; the only difference is that, in jail, the main subject is crime.

  If you send young people into maximum-security prisons they will meet terrorists, drug smugglers, top fraudsters, arms dealers and all sorts of people. I met the American Mafia, Tong, Triads, the IRA, the UDA, people who specialised in forged documents, cartels and all that. When you are in there you are living together 24/7, like you do at university, so of course people learn from each other.

  You are learning, talking to each other, and you come out with a degree in organised crime. You know how terrorists make bombs; how drugs smugglers evade customs; how to create false identities; where to buy guns, what sort of guns to buy; and how to carry out more efficient armed robberies.

  We had prisoners from foreign countries in there. One time, a group of them asked how many police we had in Britain. Someone told them, and then they asked how many villains there were.

  ‘And you do what they tell you? Why don’t you just shoot them?’ they told us.

  That was the mentality of foreign criminals. They were filling our heads with all that.

  It’s a violent, dark world and – as I keep stressing – there’s no glamour in it. You get people coming out addicted to drugs when they’ve never used drugs before. Some kids think it’s glamorous to mix with gangsters, but they get eaten alive in jail.

  You have to have a reputation before you go in, and belong to a firm, or else you become known as a Hobbit – you know, those dopey-looking things that would look out of place at any university.

  There were nights when you would go and eat with the IRA. They talked about bombs and incendiary devices. They wanted to disrupt the prisons at the time, and cause strikes and all that. We all got involved in those. The IRA had a political agenda; they weren’t criminals like us. They would manipulate criminals to create sit-downs and riots in prisons.

  When I met the Tong, they were usually inside for dealing in millions of pounds’ worth of heroin. In prison all the Chinese stuck together, but I got to know one of the top men, who was called Sheng.

  One day, he said, ‘Brother, come and eat with us. When you come out of here, brother, you come and see me. We will make you good money.’

  Sheng saw me as ‘good stuff’. I was violent in those days – I’d had a few fights in prison, and he knew I was a bit lively.

  Well, I liked Chinese food so I went to eat with them. I used to sit with him and he was waited on hand and foot by all his underlings.

  He said people had grassed on them and he wanted the grasses sorted out. He didn’t like ‘Chinese doing Chinese’, and wanted me to do a bit of work. He also told me how much money there was in the heroin game, but I told him that wasn’t my style. I said I was an armed robber and that was what I did.

  ‘But guns are guns. You shoot people. If you shoot people for me, I will pay you big money.’

  I politely declined his offer.

  Then there was the American Mafia. A group of them were arrested in England when they landed to change planes after a $15 million bond swindle. They were arrested with all those bent bonds and they got ten years each. At Maidstone, I got on really well with them – Jimmy, Charlie and a couple of others. They’d ask me to get some meatballs nicked from the kitchen because they wanted to make spag bol.

  ‘Come to see us in America when we get out of here,’ Jimmy would say. ‘You’re a good boy, Bobby.’

  They didn’t know how the British jail system worked, so I told them all about it. In return, they told me about the rackets that went down in America, including the way they carried out frauds and extortion rackets.

  You could tell they were the Mafia because they had a certain way about them. They lived well and had everything they wanted. Jimmy thought he was a bit of an artist, although he wasn’t very good. He painted teeth pure white, like in the toothpaste adverts, and it all looked a bit false. Jimmy was highly educated, and Charlie was a minder – a really heavy bit of work.

  They told me how I could do better armed robberies. They said I was too near the front; they said I had to sit back and let the soldiers do the work. I learned more about the structure of organised crime from people like the Mafia and the Triads, something that had really helped me when I got out after my manslaughter sentence and organised all the armed robberies.

  It’s crazy to put young offenders into a situation where they are meeting terrorists and people like that. Because prisons are too full, people who shouldn’t be in together have to be, and they are learning from each other. For example, I can teach you how to be a subversive – I learned all that off the IRA. (You go in, rip the plumbing out and flood the prison. Where do you put the prisoners then?)

  All we hear nowadays is hard talk about taking away this privilege and that privilege. But if this prison or that prison goes up in smoke during a riot, look at the amount of money it will take to replace the jail! Prisoners are at risk because old scores get settled in a riot and guys stab each other. Prison officers get injured, too.

  Overcrowding means members of the public are more at risk. If prisoners escape, then members of the public are injured. Guys who escape know that the next time they will receive a life sentence, but they don’t give a shit. If you get in their way they’re going to hurt you, because they’re not planning to get caught and start that life sentence.

  We need a proper rehabilitation programme. Some minor crimes don’t need prison sentences. People should be sent to training centres and rehabilitation places, and that would be their sentence. They would attend a full course of training. These people need to be put back into work in the construction industry, trades like plumbing or even green industries. We should be training them to cope with the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth century.

  Britain has also got to get rid of this ‘three strikes and you’re out’ system that was imported from America. In the old days, if a burglar was a non-violent offender he got a lower sentence. Now if you are a burglar and you have three offences, you are going to get a really long sentence. So, if you are faced with that long sentence and you are non-violent, you could decide not to leave any witnesses behind after your next robbery. Now you have a potentially violent person who received no credit for his non-violent crimes.

  After the Great Train Robbery, sentences became ridiculous. The gang captured the public’s imagination, and made the authorities look foolish, so the government declared war on armed robbers. Sentences tripled. Before, if you were an armed robber, ten years was a big sentence. When they sentenced people to thirty and forty years, armed robbers decided they might as well shoot the people while doing the bit of work and leave no witnesses behind. That was being said to us in the university of crime.

  This university for criminals also taught me some lethal ways of hurting people. You learned how to adapt and make weapons – when you were released you were fully versed in the subject. You also learned how to conce
al them, as you had to get past the prison officers during the searches; the drug smugglers taught us how to do that.

  A prisoner could develop a lethal list of weapons from everyday goods. If we had a plastic toothbrush, we warmed up the plastic and got one of those disposable razors with twin blades. We put the two blades in it to create a cut-throat weapon.

  You could also get a six-inch nail from one of the workshops, hammer it into shape and that became a stiletto. The IRA did that, then soaked a nail in shit and stabbed the prison governor. They nearly killed him because he developed toxaemia.

  Another way of doing someone was to get a couple of light bulbs, grind them up and add the tiny fragments to sugar. That had to be one of the worst punishments, with the glass fragments cutting away inside the body.

  You could also put billiard balls or batteries in socks to cosh people with. Another trick was to run a razor through garlic. When you cut someone’s arse with it the skin puffed up, it was more difficult to stitch, and they were left with a nasty scar.

  Horrible, horrible stuff – but all part of the learning process.

  I learned a lot about how to be a better villain in the university of crime. I finally decided, though, that I had no use for that information personally. Instead, I used the university of crime to get a proper education – and that was all down to Charlie Richardson.

  It started off with Charlie at Parkhurst. Charlie and I got on very well. He loved books, and he had this thing about getting educated. He used to read books all the time in his cell. He would say to me, ‘Bobby, read these books. Good boy, good boy.’

  The books would be about mineralogy, politics, philosophy, business or the stock exchange. He used to have press cuttings about minerals and what was going up and down in the marketplace. Charlie was years ahead of his time, and he went out to South Africa to buy mining rights. Everyone else was thinking local while he was thinking global.

  He said that I was different to a lot of the morons doing bird because I actually had a brain.

  Charlie was so switched on. He was too intelligent to be in jail. You could spend the night with him and it would be fascinating. Charlie would feed into your ambition and motivate you. He was family to me and was always there for me. He was a small pawn, caught up in a big political game: he had bugged Harold Wilson’s office. It was in the mid-1960s, and the South African intelligence services believed Wilson was a communist and might have sympathies with their opponents. Charlie told me that a cleaning firm bugged Wilson’s office and it was a really easy job to organise. He simply put the right people in touch with each other.

  He went on about the importance of being educated, and it rubbed off on me. If you talked to Reggie Kray, he’d be looking at a map of North London and saying, ‘I could have this when I get out, or that area …’ I thought to myself that I’d already had all of that; I also knew that the manors were full of teenagers who would blow people’s heads off because they were stoned and didn’t give a shit.

  And Charlie reminded me that if I went out armed robbing again, I would end up doing life inside or I would be shot dead. I wasn’t keen on either of his options. He gave me the third alternative, and I preferred that.

  ‘You have to take the other route,’ Charlie said to me one day, his intense blue eyes penetrating my very soul as he held a batch of books aloft. ‘You have to go down the road of education. You will get respect, you will be writing your own cheques, and you won’t get shot.’

  While I was at Parkhurst, some of the country’s most dangerous men were writing letters, having debates with the governor about prison rules, and gaining qualifications. I have to say that Charlie started it all off, and I followed his example, later, of getting prisoners to use their brains. Some of those debates would have made a trained barrister proud. I’m sure that the prison authorities would have preferred BBC radio and the Open University to be outlawed as subversive organisations. Screws were trained to deal with dangerous prisoners, not to watch them taking part in debates or organise classes for newly educated inmates.

  BBC Radio 4 and the Open University taught prisoners to behave like decent human beings. The prisons normally dealt with moronic thugs who were used to the language of violence. I’m sure that the authorities saw educated prisoners as the ones who might cause trouble; we could write to MPs, newspapers and even the Home Secretary. We thought nothing of writing informed letters to the Chief Inspector of Prisons. Imagine a governor’s horror when the inspector replied to our letters and came for a look around!

  Prisoners who listened to debates on the radio and embarked on Open University courses were viewed with great suspicion. Later on, when I looked at prison budgets, I was amazed to see the amount spent on security, which only turned out brutalised, angry men who would offend again. Charlie and I campaigned to have more spent on therapy and education to turn out humane and safe prisoners.

  No matter what you talked to Charlie about, he knew the subject off by heart. You have to remember he was inside for a very long time. Charlie was a sponge for knowledge. No doubt about it: if he’d been born into a middle-class background he would have ended up in the House of Lords as one of the top goers.

  As Charlie shook the books above his head to emphasise his point, then dropped them on the table for extra effect, I knew that my life was about to change for ever.

  ‘You need to get out of here and into the Open University at Maidstone. They do a good job there. Get on with it.’

  When Charlie spoke forcefully, you didn’t argue. I knew he had my best interests at heart, and I mulled over what he said. Luckily, I knew a good prison officer at Parkhurst – they’re not all bad – and we got on well. He was called Foxy, and I believe Charlie had a word with him. Foxy put forward my case for going to Maidstone, although it wasn’t going to be easy because I’d caused chaos there during a previous stay.

  I knew from Charlie that if I went down the learning route then I would lose out on money. In my day, if you worked in the tailor’s shop or the kitchen, you were paid top money. If you went into education, to better yourself, the money didn’t add up to much. So everyone who wanted to buy extra goodies went into sweatshops, not thinking of the future.

  Off I went to Maidstone, then, wondering about my reception committee. After all, I’d been thrown out of the place a few years earlier for organising strikes, sit-downs and all that.

  As soon as I walked through the door – heavily escorted – I spotted the deputy governor. I remembered that I’d thrown a bucket of shit over him.

  He came over to me and said, ‘Any sort of riot or anything like that, and I’ll have you moved again.’

  ‘Well, you moved me last time and I’m back again,’ I answered, with a few swear words thrown in.

  The deputy governor and his staff knew that I was well connected. I received letters from Lord Longford, Tony Benn, the Duke of Devonshire and other big players. The deputy governor was a bit wary of me. He had been on the wrong end of the riots at Durham jail, and I doubted he would rise to be governor.

  Anyway, I went to see the governor himself, Colin Allan, and he asked me, ‘If I give you a job in the education department, would you work there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘because it would give me access to books, education programmes and all that. I’ll go on condition that you back me for an Open University degree.’

  ‘Well, I’ll put a word in for you and see what can be done.’

  ‘Otherwise, fuck the lot of you,’ I muttered. ‘I’ll just sit in my cell. I’m living all right.’

  Looking back, with my record, and the things I said, I consider myself fortunate to be given such a chance.

  To be fair to the governor, he did then come to see me and said I could have a job in the education department. I knew they wanted me off the wing anyway, in case I wound up the other prisoners and started more riots. Plus, I was well into my prison sentence. And, being a recognised troublemaker, sweatshops were never an option.
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br />   So, I went into the education block and started my learning process, studying sociology, psychology and all that. The Open University was brilliant, all the way through.

  My job – education orderly – meant that I could read all the books I wanted and concentrate on my studies. Maidstone prison at the time was a training prison. Mr Allan was a decent man who cared about prisoners and encouraged education and rehabilitation, backing my ideas to the hilt.

  I’d describe him as ‘enlightened’. When my mum was ill with cancer, I had had to go to see her with three sets of handcuffs on and a chain that went down my leg. I was also handcuffed to a screw. Mum had wanted to stay at home instead of going into hospital: when I visited, there were armed police all around her flat. Nearer to the end of my sentence, Mr Allan was good enough to let me visit my mother before she died, without the handcuffs on – even though everyone told him that I would escape.

  Before I went, he called me into his office and told me if I gave him my word he would let me go home without cuffs. He said I would be supervised by the chief education officer, Major Bev Bingham. Major Bingham and the senior probation officer at Maidstone were really the ones who showed me humanity there.

  ‘Do you regret having me?’ I asked my mum as she lay in her bed, close to death.

  ‘I don’t regret anything, Bobby,’ she told me. ‘The only regret I have is that you robbed the Bank of Ireland. That’s where I bank, and I have to see the manager all the time!’

  I knew that my life of crime had actually broken her heart, but she kept her humour as she approached the end of her life. I told her about my education, the Open University and everything, and it brought a smile to her face. She said I had seen the light.

  The governor had understood how a prisoner’s mind worked and had studied the rules of the organised criminals. He knew that by my giving him my word, those were the strongest handcuffs he could put me in. The hierarchy had put their jobs on the line for me; I appreciated that and the visit went off without incident. Mind you, playing it straight did me no favours with the screws: it seemed that they had been taking bets on me absconding, and my good behaviour cost them a lot of money.