Gangland UK: The Inside Story of Britain's Most Evil Gangsters (12 page)

The implications of such findings are significant. They suggest that the criminality of the Krays could possibly have had more to do with genetic programming than the poverty and villainy of the East End or the manner in which they were raised. Perhaps a combination of nurture and nature lies at the heart of the twins’ rise and fall – what’s almost certain is that we’re unlikely ever to see again such an iconic and powerful pairing of underworld gang leaders. As brothers, they shared blood; and they shared the blood of their victims, too.

P
ublic fascination with the Krays has lasted long after the demise of their underworld empire and their deaths, but they were not the only villains of their generation whose names have gone down in criminal legend, for the 1960s produced a large number of characters whose defiance of law and order earned them a recognition that has sometimes bordered on respect and admiration.

Perhaps the single most famous crime of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ – the era of Carnaby Street, the mini-skirt and the 1961 Morris Mini – was The Great Train Robbery. On 8 August 1963, 15 hooded men stopped the Glasgow-
to-London
‘Up-Special’ overnight mail train at Bridego Bridge, at Ledburn, Buckinghamshire, robbing it of
£
2.6 million. Up to that time, Britain’s most spectacular
robberies had yielded only a fraction of that sum and the scale and audacity of the operation appalled the authorities. During the raid, the train driver, Jack Mills, was coshed over the head. Mills never fully recovered and died seven years later. The
£
2.3 million haul has never been recovered.

John McVicar was once described as ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’. His criminal career stretched from the late 1950s through to his final arrest and renunciation of crime in 1970. He was involved in armed robberies, assaults on the police and two escapes. He remained on the run for over two years.

What was most remarkable about McVicar, however, was his transformation from violent crime to study and authorship. In 1974, he published his autobiography and three years later was awarded an Honours degree. After his parole in 1978, he became a journalist and also gave lectures on the subject of crime. In 1980, Roger Daltrey starred in the film
McVicar
, which was based on John’s career.

Most people, when they think of English strong-arm rackets, think, often with fondness, of the Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie, who dominated the British underworld for much of the 1950s and 1960s. There is, however, another lesser known band of brothers who also built a gang to work the protection/extortion racket, and the Richardsons were even more depraved than their more famous counterparts. Compared to the Krays, Charles and Eddie Richardson were almost amateur in their criminal endeavours, but in cruelty and violence they were every bit the Krays’ equals.

Alike only in their shared passion for brutal aggression,
Charlie and Eddie Richardson were in all other respects very different from the Krays. Whereas Reggie and Ronnie began from nothing, the Richardsons were primarily dubious businessmen, from a middle-class background, who found brutality a useful supplement to their legitimate activities.

The gang was most famously involved in a mid-1960s turf war with the Krays, which ultimately led to their downfall. Incidents like the murder of Kray associate Richard Hart and the arrest of Richardson gang member Johnny Bradbury in connection with the murder of a businessman in South Africa enabled the police to follow the gang’s trail, and a CID squad arrested most of the gang members in 1966.

The trial, which began in April 1967, resulted in the sentencing of Charlie for 25 years, and his brother Eddie for 10 years. Charlie, after escaping from prison in 1980, gave himself up voluntarily and was then released in 1984, while Eddie was sentenced in 1990 for trading in drugs, although he was later released.

Among the accused arraigned for what was dubbed ‘The Torture Trial’ were Charles William Richardson, aged 32, company director, of Acland Crescent, Denmark Hill; his wife, Mrs Jean Richardson; Roy Hall, aged 25, metal sorter of Rangefield Road, Balham; Derek Brian Mottram, aged 32, caterer, of Somers Road, Balham; Thomas Clarke, aged 33, unemployed, of Fulham Road, Fulham; James Henry Kensitt, aged 51, salesman, of Homer Road, Fulham; James Thomas Fraser, aged 24, porter, of Midwell Street, Walworth; Robert Geoffrey St Leger, aged 44, dealer, of Broomhill Road, Middlesex; and Eddie Richardson, company director, also of Denmark Hill.

The Richardsons’ lingering notoriety stems from their treatment of those who fell foul of them, which included beatings, extracting teeth with pliers, and electric shocks from a converted army field telephone placed inside a specially designed brown box, which generated a current when the handle on its side was cranked. They also bought a machine called a ‘Spitmatic’, a building tool designed to fire nails into concrete. On one occasion, this was used on a victim to pin his foot to the floor, and they often used bolt-cutters to remove toes.

Afterwards, if the victims were too badly injured, they would be sent to an ex-doctor who had been struck off the medical register. This process of trial and torture was known as ‘taking a shirt from Charlie’, because of Charlie Richardson’s habit of giving each victim a clean shirt in which to return home.

The notorious Richardson gang was active during the 1960s. Operating from south London, it was led by Charles ‘Charlie’ Richardson, his younger brother Edward ‘Eddie’, and Frances Davidson Fraser, aka ‘Mad Frankie’, born 13 December 1923. Charlie had turned to a life of crime when the departure of their father left their family penniless, and he invested in scrap metal, while Eddie operated fruit machines. These businesses were, however, merely fronts for underworld activities which included fraud, theft and dealing in stolen goods.

The Richardsons’ big scam was buying foreign items like nylon stockings on credit and failing to pay the bill. Charlie was the ‘brains’ of the outfit that operated on London’s south side, in a nightclub they dubbed ‘Club Astor’.

In addition to the credit ploy, the Richardsons liked to threaten their way into partnerships with legitimate
businessmen who would be intimidated into
co-operation
by threats of terrible violence.

In the basement of the club, the Richardsons had a torture chamber that rivalled anything from the Inquisition. On one occasion, in 1964, as they sat down to a dinner of scampi, the rest of the gang worked over a businessman who came into the club to collect money Charlie owed him. Derek John Lucien Harris was negotiating the sale of a company, and wanted payment for his services. Richardson greeted him with, ‘I like you, Lucien, and I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘On Richardson’s order, they removed my shoes and my toes were wired to the generator,’ Harris said during the Torture Trial in 1967. ‘Roy Hall turned the handle and the shock caused me to jump out of my chair and I fell to the floor. Afterwards, Richardson screwed his thumbs into my eyes. It was very painful, and I could not see for a few minutes.’

Harris testified that the shock was repeated on other parts of his body. ‘After that, I was stripped, except for my shirt, and the shock treatment was repeated. As I rolled on the floor, Richardson said the generator wasn’t working very well and orange squash was poured over my feet. Then I was bound and gagged and given further electric shocks to various parts of my body. Finally, Richardson said I was to be taken to the marshes where I gathered I would be killed and dumped under a pile of refuse.’

As Harris was recovering from the treatment and getting dressed, Charlie pinned his left foot to the floor with a knife. In court, Harris removed his shoe to show the two scars on his foot. ‘The knife went in there and came out there,’ said Harris.
The next ten minutes of court time was devoted to looking at the man’s foot. First, the judge inspected it, then the members of the jury filed past it, in pairs. Finally, the foot was surrounded by the barristers on both sides of the trial, Crown and defence – never before, or since, has the foot of a person been the subject of such intense legal scrutiny.

All in all, Harris told the stunned court that his torture lasted for six hours, after which Charlie apologised and gave him the money he had come for –
£
150 in cash.

While the Krays were willing to murder to maintain order or settle a grudge, the Richardsons seemed to like torture and were never convicted of murder. True, some of their victims did disappear and police were unable to locate them, but no charges were ever brought. ‘Edward Richardson punched me in the face,’ said petty criminal, Jack Duval, a member of the Richardson gang, who had been pressed into the nylon-importing scam by threats. ‘Then, when I fell down, I was beaten with golf clubs. When I asked what I had done to deserve that, I was told, “You just do as Charlie tells you.”’

On one occasion, a collector of ‘pensions’ (protection money from pub landlords and others), who was twice warned by the brothers after he pocketed the money and spent it at Catford dog track, was nailed to the floor of a warehouse near Tower Bridge for nearly two days, during which time gang members frequently urinated on him.

Another notable character in the Richardson gang was James Alfred ‘Jimmy’ Moody, a gangster and hitman whose career spanned more than four decades and included run-ins with Jack Spot, who is mentioned in the Krays’ chapter.

At one time, Moody was the number-one enforcer for the Richardson brothers, did freelance work for the Krays, and he became one of the most feared criminals to emerge from the London underworld – all before he reached the age of 30. In the 1970s, he joined a team of criminals to form ‘The Chainsaw Gang’, who went on to become that decade’s most successful armed robbers.

Moody seemed to live up to his surname very well, for, as soon he fell in with a gang, he fell out, and he changed allegiances at the drop of a hat.

In 1979, he was imprisoned for murder and armed robbery. While in Brixton Prison, his cell mate was Gerard Tuite, a staunch and senior member of the Provos – the provisional IRA. In 1980, during the hunger strike in the winter of that year, the two men escaped and went on the run – the resourceful Moody was never recaptured.

The escape was audacity itself. Tuite, Moody and another inmate tunnelled through walls of their cells in the top-security remand wing, dropped into a yard where they used builders’ planks and scaffolding piled up for repairs to scale the 15ft perimeter wall. Today, Gerry, now in his mid-fifties, is a very successful businessman in south Cavan and the north Meath region.

While in hiding, Tuite indoctrinated Moody with stories of brutality and torture inflicted on the Irish by the British and convinced him to join the IRA.

To put a little perspective into the relationship Moody enjoyed with the Richardsons, and the clout they must have had, it is worth noting that Moody didn’t mix with just anybody. Gerard Tuite, for example, at 26, had made Irish history in 1982 by becoming the first Irish citizen charged with an offence committed in another
country, and he made world headlines. His prosecution in his asylum state, Ireland, for offences committed elsewhere was a landmark in international law governing political crimes.

In 1978, using the
nom de guerre
David Coyne, he had moved into a girlfriend’s flat in 144 Trafalgar Road, Greenwich. Before the end of the year, he was found guilty of possession of explosives with intent to endanger life. A sawn-off shotgun and an Armalite rifle were also found in the flat. These and other items, including car keys and voice recordings, linked him to various bombings, as well as the targeting of senior British Conservative and royal figures. It is claimed that he was linked with, or involved, in no less than 18 bombing attacks in five British cities with Patrick Magee, the Brighton Bomber, alone.

Soon, Moody’s murderous skills were being put to use as he became the Provo’s secret deadly assassin – a man who struck so much fear into Northern Ireland’s security services that the Thatcher Government put a three-man SAS hit squad on his tail in the mid-1980s.

By the late 1980s, Moody realised he was in danger of overstaying his welcome in Ireland and, inevitably, the lure of the East End persuaded him to return home. He believed that his reputation as a hired killer would keep him one step ahead of trouble, and the law, but he had lost his edge and the London he returned to was a very different place. Huge drug deals, mainly involving Ecstasy and cocaine, rather than armed robbery, were financing many criminals’ lavish lifestyles. The stakes were far higher than ‘the old days’, and so were the profits.

By the early 1990s, Moody’s list of enemies read like a
Who’s Who
of criminals from both sides of the water. Then there were the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British security services to deal with, making it only a matter of time before he was murdered in 1993.

Another ‘associate’ of Moody’s and, by extension, the Richardsons and the Krays, was gangster and criminal mastermind William ‘Billy’ Hill. From a London family, Hill started his career as a burglar in the late 1920s, then graduated to ‘smash-and-grab’ raids, targeting jewellers and furriers in the 1930s. During World War II, and now in his late twenties, he moved into the black market, specialising in food, diesel and petrol. Another of his specialities was the supply of forged documents to deserting servicemen and, with Jack Spot, running lucrative protection rackets. The two men soon became deadly rivals.

Towards the end of the 1940s, he was charged with burgling a warehouse and fled to South Africa, where he immediately took over illegal activities at several Johannesburg nightclubs. Hill came to the attention of the local police following an assault. He was extradicted to Britain, where he was convicted for the warehouse robbery and served a prison term.

Upon his release, Hill appeared – at least to
law-abiding
citizens – to have turned over a new leaf. He opened several legitimate nightclubs, which were, in fact, fronts for his expanding criminal activities that included bookmaking and loan sharking. In 1952, he robbed a post office van, netting
£
250,000, and also ran a cigarette smuggling operation from Morocco.

Towards the end of the 1950s, Hill retired from active
involvement in criminal enterprises, preferring to bankroll other gangsters. With his enforcer, Albert ‘Italian Al’ Dimes, he continued to run his nightclubs, including one in the fashionable Sunningdale area of Surrey, into the 1970s. He died of natural causes, a very wealthy man in 1984, aged 73.