The Long Firm

by Jake Arnott

  But it was the first time Harry made any reference to his sexuality. I felt there was an opportunity for some sort of symbolic inter-actionism there. I was to be disappointed. I brought up Gay Liberation at the next class and after a bit of sniggering someone asked: ‘What do you think of that then, Harry?’

  Harry’s nostrils widened slightly, his mouth flattened into an impassive sneer.

  ‘I’m not gay,’ he said sternly. ‘I’m homosexual but I’m not gay.’

  Oo, get madam, someone muttered behind him and his head swivelled sharply around. I pondered on his use of a pathological term in preference to a subcultural one, but I let it pass.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he went on. ‘At least I’m open about it. I know what goes on inside. I tell you, Lenny, I ain’t queer in prison. It’s normal in here. Just because I’m like this naturally some people think it gives them the edge over me. They actually imagine that in any kind of normal setting I’d fancy them. As if I could get any real hard on for the old lags in here.’

  ‘So what do you think about Gay Liberation?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah,’ he replied dismissively. ‘They’re all too poofy and scruffy. I’m not into long hair neither. I like a boy to be well turned out.’

  ‘Yeah, but what about their ideas?’ someone asked.

  Harry chuckled darkly.

  ‘Well,’ he said with a gleam in his eye. ‘Someone once called Ronnie Kray a fat poof. Ronnie took the top of his head off with a Luger. That’s my sort of Gay Liberation. Though, to be honest, I think it was the fat part what got to him. Ron’s, well, touchy about his weight.’

  But I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the concept of a homosexual gangster. I talked about it to Janine when we were in bed together one afternoon.

  ‘Doesn’t it surprise you?’

  ‘No, not really. I mean, we’re all a bit gay aren’t we?’

  ‘Not me,’ I replied hastily.

  ‘Well, I am.’

  ‘Really?’

  I smiled. The thought of it rather excited me.

  ‘But surely, this guy’s sexuality isn’t that important. He’s a man, and a very violent one at that. It just proves that all men are predisposed to violence. Gay or not.’

  ‘So where have you been picking up these ideas?’

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Lenny. I’ve been learning a lot recently. Things that I never really thought about before but sort of knew all along. “Consciousness raising” we call it in the women’s group.’

  ‘In the what?’

  I sat upright in the bed.

  ‘Oh,’ Janine sighed. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I’ve been going to Karen’s women’s group.’

  I stared at her, open mouthed.

  ‘You haven’t,’ I stuttered. ‘You haven’t told her, have you? About us?’

  ‘No. I thought you might have. You did say it was an open relationship.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell her, are you?’

  ‘Of course I’m going to tell her,’ Janine replied, indignantly. ‘It would be very unsisterly not to. Karen’s a wonderful woman. I’ve learnt so much from her. The group’s really changed my life.’

  I felt suddenly sick. I got out of bed and started pulling on my jeans.

  ‘What’s the matter, Lenny?’

  ‘What?’ I choked. ‘Oh Jesus!’

  ‘You really do look silly, Lenny. Karen’s right, you know. She always says men are like children.’

  There was a power cut on the night of Karen’s next women’s group. I went about the house putting nightlights on saucers in strategic places for illumination. The smell of wax smoke conjured unwelcome altar-boy memories. I felt horribly guilty. I knew that I should have told Karen before Janine had had a chance to. But I didn’t dare. The front door slammed. A group of little flames flickered on the kitchen table. Like votive candles lit for atonement. Karen walked in, her shadow dancing across the ceiling.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s the power workers. The unions are really starting to get militant. A few more months of this . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ she cut in flatly.

  ‘Karen, look . . .’

  ‘You bastard,’ she hissed at me in the half darkness.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, you’re sorry, are you? Well, that’s great. Men. You’re all the fucking same.’

  ‘Now look, don’t make a political point out of this. It was just an affair.’

  ‘The personal is political, Lenny.’

  ‘It’s not a serious thing . . .’

  ‘I wonder what you do take seriously, Lenny.’

  ‘Well, this never used to be an issue.’

  ‘Oh right. Back in the swinging sixties. Some great sexual revolution that turned out to be. We lost out, you know, Lenny. Women lost out. It was only men who gained any freedom. We were supposed to just lie back and pretend we were enjoying it. Men get to do all the fucking. Women just get to do the faking.’

  ‘Karen, look . . .’

  ‘You’re pathetic, you know that? You think you’re some kind of stud in your leather jacket and ponytail. You’re just using, or rather abusing, your power on impressionable young women.’

  ‘Now, wait a minute . . .’

  ‘You are, Lenny. Like all men. You use your power to try to dominate women. You’re an oppressor, don’t you forget that, because I won’t.’

  And with that she stormed out and slammed the door.

  Directly as I came in from the main gate of Long Marsh, I was escorted for a short distance along by the perimeter wall, past the main wings of the prison, on the way to the maximum-security section. As we passed each block there came a now familiar humming sound. Hundreds of indistinguishable voices hovered up from every cell, landing and wing. Like the buzzing of insects in a hive, strangely soothing. Then we went down into the Submarine.

  I had begun to get worried about group dynamics in the classes. Jeff, a mild-mannered triple murderer, dropped out. He told me in the corridor at the end of a session that he didn’t feel he was getting any proper attention. He felt Harry always took over the class.

  ‘He always dominates everything,’ he said, looking around to make sure no one was listening. ‘It’s like in the TV room. We’ll have a vote, like, about which programme we’re going to watch and then he’ll come in and say, “What, we having the film on then?” and change it over. And nobody says anything because they know he could have a right row about it. I thought it’d be different, doing this class, like, but it’s the same, him taking over as usual. It’s like he’s running the sessions, not you.’

  ‘You think I let him dominate the group?’

  ‘You know you fucking do, Lenny.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try not to let it happen so much.’

  Jeff laughed flatly at this.

  ‘You think you control him any better than we could? You’re as intimidated by him as we are.’

  ‘Well, I could try. I wouldn’t want you to stop coming to the classes just because of this.’

  ‘Nah,’ Jeff replied with a shrug. ‘I ain’t that bothered, to tell you the truth. At least now there’ll be one night a week that we can watch whatever channel we want.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry you feel that way.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Lenny. I mean, Harry, he’s like your star pupil, isn’t he?’

  I was a bit disturbed by this observation. It was hard to deny that I could be intimidated by Harry Starks. The Torture Gang Boss had a fearsome reputation. I soon found out that in the nomenclature of villainy he was known as Mad Harry. His violence could be explosive and unexpected. I also found out that this referred to an actual history of mental illness. Again it was hard for me not to be intrigued by the potential application of deviancy theory to this. I brought up R.D. Laing’s work in one of the sessions. We discussed conformity and how creative potential is often seen as madness. The social construct of mental health and the labelling perspective of mental illne
ss. Harry was his usual critical self.

  ‘Yeah, that’s all very well,’ he commented. ‘But without my pills I go off the fucking rails.’

  In fact, Harry had his own version of anti-psychiatry: if you go mad they can lock you up for good. He had a deep fear of ending up in Broadmoor with no fixed release date. And this fear was at the heart of his obsession with exercising his mental capacities. Education was a way of keeping on top of things.

  And he had a very sharp mind. I suppose that Jeff was right, I didn’t manage to do anything that effectively pulled him back from dominating the group. But he was so relentless in his questioning, so consistently full of ideas. This was as intimidating as his physical presence. He never let me off the hook nor let me assume any kind of expertise in what was, after all, as much his field as it was my subject. ‘You’ve really crow-barred that idea, Lenny,’ he’d complain if I ever appeared clumsy in my analysis. He kept me on my toes. As with other areas of his life, he demanded rigour.

  And whilst many of the other inmates readily took to deviancy theory, sometimes as a way to explain their crimes, Harry was reluctant to go along with this. It was as if it represented an excuse for failure. For some of the group, a bank robber for instance, their actions could easily be seen, somewhat romantically perhaps, in the context of an attack on advanced capitalism and conformity. In Harry’s case his career rather held up a mirror to it.

  ‘I wasn’t a gangster,’ he insisted, with no conscious irony. ‘I was a businessman.’

  Despite this, I laboured through theory with the group. Harry went along with it, elusive and obscure as ever. And though he displayed a natural resistance to my central thesis, he remained fascinated by self-analysis. ‘I’ve always been interested in psychology,’ he said. And I felt that I’d planted a seed. He wanted to learn and I felt that his self-examination would bear fruit. I was sure that he actually embodied the argument I was advocating. There was something tantalising about the ambiguity of Harry’s criminality. It seemed to go to the heart of the whole academic enterprise that I was engaged in. With all his contradictions, he was a living discourse on the sociology of deviance.

  About this time I published a paper: Gangsterism: The Deviancy of Capitalism. I started by examining the roots of deviancy theory itself. It seemed no coincidence that its formation took place in the Chicago School of the ’20s and ’30s. A time and place of widespread racketeering and mob activity. Amidst a post-war boom, furious demographic changes and the chaos of commercial deregulation, moral uncertainties emerged. Al Capone could be seen in this light as the Godfather of the sociology of deviance. His criminal corporatism had so thoroughly confused images of normality with spectres of abnormality that there was an inevitable change in attitudes to social norms.

  And so, the gangster provides a realignment of these norms. Placed at the edge of modern values, he reassures it, gently mocking it in his mimicry of the trappings of big business, the well-tailored suit, the fast car, etc. The gangster’s very extremism co-operates with the everyday world of the free market. ‘Their alienation from our reality frees them to be subtly induced into realising our moral fantasies’ (Goffman, 1972:267). Furthermore, they can project a dynamic of character in order to reify the adventure of capitalism.

  At this point enter, stage right, the Hollywood gangster. In his seminal essay of 1948, The Gangster as Tragic Hero, Robert Warshow asserts the startling idea of the gangster as fundamentally an aesthetic as much as a physical threat. ‘The gangster, though there are real gangsters, is also, and primarily, a creature of the imagination’ (ibid.).

  I then used my inside knowledge of Harry to examine gangsters of our own time and culture and how they epitomised the contradictions of our own age. In a sense, Harry Starks, the Kray Twins, et al., were already following in a tradition. In the context of a post-austerity boom, they represented a dark undercurrent beneath the so-called ‘swinging sixties’. A brooding presence that undermined the notion of this era being one of liberation and permissiveness. Liminal behaviour kept the lid on a potential social revolution with superficial charm. The glamour, the style, the friends in high places and showbiz personalities were all shot through with a deep sense of menace. ‘Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror’ (Bataille, 1932:17).

  Presuming the authority of working-class culture, the gangster actually upholds the binary systems of late-stage capitalism. Charity work goes hand in hand with protection rackets. In seemingly opposing operations of extortion and philanthropy, he becomes both malevolent folk devil and benevolent folk hero. Furthermore, he resolves the dichotomy of the individual and the collective. Despite semantically implying adherence to a gang, the gangster instead becomes a distillation of mass culture into an individual pathology. Like Robert Musil’s criminal Moosbrugger in The Man without Qualities, the gang boss inhabits a psychological as well as a social underworld. ‘If mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger.’

  Thus he provides catharsis. In acting out the deep fears and potentially dangerous ambitions of the individual in the market economy, the very deviancy of the gangster allows capitalism to exorcise itself and reassert its moral normalcy.

  The course came to the end of its allotted span and there was no indication from the Prison Education Department that it would be renewed as an activities option for the inmates of the Submarine. All I heard were rumours that the Governor and the Assistant Governor had decided that the project had a dangerous whiff of subversiveness to it. Officers had been complaining that the prisoners taking the course had become even more gobby than usual. They’d gained a further articulacy in asserting their rights. Stuffing soft toys was clearly a better way of encouraging rehabilitation.

  Many of the men I got to know on E Wing said that they wanted to continue some sort of study. I was always encouraging, even though I thought at times I was merely being humoured. Harry was particularly enthusiastic about the idea. As usual, he had his reasons.

  ‘You know those Scandinavian studies you talked about?’ he said to me on the last day. ‘You know, the psychological effects of long-term incarceration. Sensory deprivation and all that. Well, they reckon, what? Five years, seven years at best before you start to crack up. Seven years, that’s all I’ve got. Seven years bad luck. But bad luck is better than no luck. You know what I mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do, Harry.’

  ‘Listen,’ he hissed, drawing my face closer to his with a casual beckoning gesture. His eyes narrowed on mine. ‘I mean, I looked at you and thought the only thought that makes any kind of sense in here. I thought: are you my way out of here? Seven years, then I’m up for my first parole board. Eat your porridge every day, do your time the easy way. So what’s this? I’m thinking: is this the easy way? You know, this education racket. O levels, A levels, Open University, open sesame. Know what I mean? If I educate myself, it’s like I’m reforming, ain’t it? It’s bound to go down well with the board, isn’t it?’

  He smiled at me. There was an enacted confidence in his manner. He sounded desperate. I dreaded being the one responsible for getting his hopes up.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said cautiously. ‘I guess.’

  Harry sniffed doubt. His eyebrows knitted as he frowned piercingly at me.

  ‘Yeah,’ he insisted. ‘But what do you think?’

  ‘I think,’ I replied quickly, wary of any tension that a pause might produce. ‘I think that you want to do it anyway. You want to learn. You want to study, don’t you?’

  Harry grinned, for once sheepish rather than lupine.

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ he grudgingly admitted.

  I promised to put in a good word with the Education Officer, for what it was worth. Harry suggested that we stay in touch. I said that it sounded like a good idea. After all, it seemed a logical thing, for a criminologist to get to know a criminal. And I felt sure that I could maintain a certain professionalism in our acquaintance.

  So Harry started his O levels. I onl
y managed one visit after the course had finished before he was moved to Leicester. This was part of the dispersal system whereby Category A prisoners were moved around to different maximum-security wings. It was a policy implemented to try to avoid the problems of the long-term concentration of groups of dangerous cons, and little warning was given before a prisoner was moved. It became known as The Ghost Train. Or, as Harry more grandly put it, The National Tour.

  We started to write to each other. Over the next few years I was able to visit Harry only occasionally, but we kept up a fairly constant correspondence. The letters would often have a purely practical focus, he might want to discuss an essay he was writing on differential association for his sociology A level, for example. Otherwise he might simply want to let off steam, complain about conditions or conflicts with screws or other cons. All letters were subject to censorship, Category A correspondence being particularly closely vetted, so he had to be careful not to be too explicit in his criticisms or descriptions of prison life or references to criminal activity, anything, in fact, that the censor could deem ‘objectionable’ under Standing Orders.

  So Harry developed a code. If he used the phrase ‘in the final analysis’, it meant that a message was contained in the initial letters of the words that followed. Usually it wasn’t terribly subversive stuff but it provided Harry with another way of undermining the system that dominated him. A little game, a little system of his own.

  The thing about writing to someone in prison is you don’t really remember very well what you’ve said to them because your life is changing all the time. But theirs isn’t. Harry would refer meticulously to some point or other of a previous letter which I would have completely forgotten. And so he became a marker, a sort of fixed point which I could remind myself by.

  Things were changing. On the outside at least. As the seventies wore on I felt a growing confusion about ideas that had seemed so certain. My academic career was going well. I had papers published, articles in New Society, even a little broadcasting work. I was getting a few ideas together for a book. Everything seemed to be going so well and yet I felt insecure. All the excitement that had come out of the National Deviancy Conference had seemed to peter out. There were scarcely any meetings any more. All these great radical ideas had gone a bit stale. Notions that had once seemed controversial now began to look threadbare and otiose. A smell of revisionism hung in the air and academics now turned on each other. That sense of a collective enterprise had all but vanished.