The World's Most Evil Gangs (12 page)

Of life in Broadmoor, he said: ‘There are some really bad ones in here. But they are all some mother’s sons – and that’s where the heartbreak is. Because no matter what they’ve done or how they’ve been, the mothers don’t stop coming and don’t stop loving them. When I see these mums, I feel really sorry for them having to come here.’

In 1982 the twins’ strongest link with the outside world ended. Their most constant visitor, their mother Violet, died one week before her 73rd birthday. Violet Kray had become an East End legend in her own right and is said to have been the only person on earth who had any control over her boys. Ronnie and Reggie were allowed out for a day to attend her funeral, which was turned into a star-studded East End occasion.

Reggie said after his return to Parkhurst jail: ‘It’s so lonely without visits from our mum. They were always the best ones. I shall miss her so much. Through the funeral, Ronnie and I were handcuffed to police officers who must have been 6ft 3in tall. But they needn’t have worried. Violence is not part of my life anymore. I get angry when I read about the way things are in the East End nowadays. Like those attacks on old ladies. Years ago, if we saw an old lady we would help her across the road and wish her goodnight. Now they rape 80-year-old women and kill them for their pension. It makes me sick.’

Of the hopelessness of life in jail, he said: ‘You can so easily give up after these years. They have passed quickly. But it is only when I see the youngsters come in here that I realise what a terrible waste of life it is.’

It was a lesson that the Kray brothers had not fully learned, however. Elder brother Charlie Kray had been released from prison in 1975 after serving seven years. But he was back in jail in 1997 after a police sting proved his part in a conspiracy to
smuggle cocaine worth £69million. He died of natural causes in prison on 4 April 2000.

Five years earlier, Charlie had been on hand to comfort brother Reggie when the latter was allowed out of prison to attend the funeral of Ronnie Kray, who was 61 when he died on 17 March 1995 after collapsing on his ward at Broadmoor mental hospital.

The last of the Kray brothers to pass into history was Reggie. Aged 66 and suffering from inoperable bladder cancer, he was freed on compassionate grounds in September 2000 and moved from Wayland Prison, Norfolk, to a Norwich hospital. There, he invited a BBC TV crew to interview him, and surprised them by confessing to a previously unknown murder. Although he did not name the victim, it was thought to be Edward ‘Mad Teddy’ Smith, who had been missing since 1967. Explaining why he murdered Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, he said he thought him ‘very uncouth and vexatious to the spirit’. During the one-hour documentary Kray refused to give a fulsome apology for his violent behaviour. He said: ‘It is very difficult to apologise in some cases but not in others. I suppose if I’ve been a bit too violent over the years I make some apologies about it, but there’s little I can do about it now, so again it’s no good reflecting back. It’s pointless, negative.’

In the final days of his life, he booked into the bridal suite of a local hotel with his wife Roberta, whom he had married in jail in 1997. She maintained a bedside vigil until his death ten days later on 1 October 2000. He was finally reunited with his twin, being buried alongside Ronnie in Chingford Mount Cemetery.

In the media circus that followed Reggie’s death, his lawyer Mark Goldstein described the Krays as ‘icons of the twentieth century’. A less florid epitaph would have been the words of
the Old Bailey judge, Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, in sentencing them in 1969, when he told them with scornful understatement: ‘In my view society has earned a rest from your activities.’

T
he Krays and their rival gangsters the Richardsons vied with each other for the reputation of being the most monstrous merchants of terror in London. But whereas the Krays, on the north side of the Thames, were infamous for meting out instant vengeance, the Richardson gang, based south of the river, were masters of a slower punishment. Known as the ‘Torture Gang’, their notoriety stems from the penalties for those who fell foul of them, which included beatings, electric shock treatment, extracting teeth with pliers and removing toes with bolt cutters. An added speciality was the use of a building tool called a ‘Spitmatic’ to pin their enemies to the floor with six-inch nails.

Charles Richardson, born in 1934, and brother Edward, two years younger, were raised in Camberwell, Southeast London, where their mother ran a sweet shop. Their father was a feckless
rag-and-bone man, who disappeared when the boys were in their teens, leaving the family penniless. Charlie was sent to an approved school at the age of 14, escaping at one time to go on a burglary spree. Released from the school at 16, he acquired a horse and cart and went ‘totting’ for scrap metal. He and Eddie were seen as no more than petty thieves.

But along the way, they built up a string of businesses – some legitimate, others not – throughout South London. Charlie specialised in scrap metal but also ran furniture and fancy goods firms. Eddie operated fruit machines and ran a wholesale chemists’ supply company. But these were fronts for their more profitable lines of trade – fraud, theft, ‘protection’ rackets and receiving stolen goods.

The pair had good business brains and it is a tragedy that they did not concentrate on their legitimate businesses because they could have been comfortably off without ever breaking the law. But that was not their style. Eddie’s fruit machine business, for instance, was more successful than most in the same line. The reason was simple: if a pub or club owner was offered one of Eddie’s machines, he would be wise to accept. If not, he knew his premises would be broken into and vandalised or quite openly smashed up by ‘heavies’ in broad daylight.

Their most masterful moneymaking strokes, however, involved what were known as ‘long firms’, whereby goods would be ordered and quickly sold – then both the goods and the firm would vanish. A company would be set up under a Richardson nominee and begin trading perfectly legitimately. Goods would be ordered from suppliers and paid for promptly, so creating a good credit rating. After a few months’ operation, massive orders would be placed on credit with the suppliers. The goods would be quickly sold, the Richardsons would
pocket the money, and the company would seemingly evaporate into thin air.

By the age of 30, the Richardsons were millionaires. Charlie, who married a local girl called Margaret with whom he had five children, lived in a large house in Camberwell. He had a smart office in Mayfair’s Park Lane from which he ran a company with interests in mining. But his real powerbase lay south of the river, in the offices of Peckford Scrap Metal, of New Church Road, Camberwell. It was here that people whom the brothers believed had crossed them were brought in for ‘questioning’.

The Richardsons’ activities were supported by a team of brutal enforcers who ensured that those tempted to complain would think again. The brothers also had a number of bent coppers in their pocket who would immediately alert them if anyone went to the police to ‘grass them up’. Charles was once arrested for receiving stolen goods but police had to drop the charge for lack of witnesses. They kept a careful watch on the gang’s activities, however, and in 1965 they got an insight into the full horrors of their methods for keeping order and repaying old scores. In July of that year, one of the gang’s victims walked into a South London police station and related a horrific story of how he had been tortured by the Richardsons.

The sadistic punishments at these kangaroo courts were equally meted out by Charlie and Eddie. Sick with fear, the victims would be hauled in by gang enforcers and tried before Eddie and the others in a mock court. Then the punishments were ordered – anything from beatings to more fearsome forms of torture. Men were whipped, burned with cigarettes, had their teeth pulled out with pliers, were nailed to the floor, had their toes removed by bolt cutters, and leaped in agony from
the effects of electric shocks. Afterwards, if the victims were too badly injured, they would be taken to a struck-off doctor to be patched up.

A favourite tool in these interrogations was a former Army field telephone, a device that had its own electrical generator. The terminals would be attached to the victim’s body and a gang member – usually either ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser or another thug named Roy Hall – would frantically crank the handle. In one session, the electrodes attached to the feet of a victim were failing to deliver the desired level of pain. Charlie Richardson called for some orange squash. He wasn’t thirsty – the drink was poured over the prisoner’s feet to increase the flow of current. The screams of agony began again.

As the Richardsons’ empire grew, their swaggering subordinates often came into contact with their rivals in the Kray gang. At a Christmas party in a club in 1965, fighting broke out after Richardson gang member George Cornell called Ronnie Kray a ‘fat poof’. Three months later the feud worsened when the two sides fought with guns and bayonets at a Catford nightclub for which the Richardsons were providing security. An associate of the Krays was shot dead and Frankie Fraser was wounded in the thigh. The following evening, Cornell wandered off his ‘manor’ and was shot dead in the Blind Beggar pub, Whitechapel, by Ronnie Kray.

The Richardson gang was now in trouble, with Cornell dead and two other leading members behind bars. ‘Mad’ Frankie had been cleared of the Catford club murder but he and Eddie Richardson were both jailed for five years for affray. The end came when two people talked – one in England, the other at a murder trial 5,600 miles away in South Africa.

In Britain, businessman James Taggart went to police to
reveal that he had been tortured by Charlie Richardson and Frankie Fraser because his company owed a gang member £1,200. Taggart said his two torturers had used fists, boots and a metal pole to beat him for nearly nine hours, only pausing to order themselves some light refreshment of beer and sandwiches. Afterwards the victim, who had been stripped naked and trussed to a chair, was made to clean up the
bloodspattered
room with his own underpants.

Also in 1965, mineral prospector Thomas Waldeck was shot dead on the doorstep of his home in Johannesburg. Lawrence ‘Johnny’ Bradbury, a former barrow boy who lived in Peckham, South London, was arrested and confessed to being the getaway driver. But what was Bradbury doing in South Africa and why would he want Waldeck dead? It transpired that Bradbury had known Charlie Richardson since their schooldays together and that he had been leaned on by the gangster to take part in the ‘hit’. The murdered man had been Richardson’s business partner in a mining company but they had fallen out.

Facing the death sentence at his trial for murder, Bradbury cracked and told the court that Richardson was a major gangland boss, who had made him take part in the murder through fear – at one time holding him over a bar counter while someone slashed his arm with a broken bottle. Bradbury was sentenced to death, later commuted to life. Back in London, Richardson responded with hurt bewilderment: ‘I was amazed at what happened at the trial,’ he said. ‘There is no reason on earth why I should want him killed.’

British detectives flew out to speak to Bradbury in May 1966 and discovered that the murdered man had owed the Richardsons a considerable sum of money. Two months later,
in a series of dawn raids, most of the gang’s key members were seized in one of the most carefully planned operations in police history – significantly led not by the Scotland Yard chiefs but by a force from outside the city.

The following year, in the first major ‘supergrass’ trial of its kind, several witnesses came forward on the promise of immunity and new identities. The court heard from so many of Richardson’s victims that the trial became known as the ‘Torture Case’. The evidence was horrific, plentiful and persuasive. One man told how he had been attacked outside a pub then driven to Camberwell, where Charlie had placed a gun on a table and ordered him to be stripped. Then Frankie Fraser appeared with a pair of pliers. ‘He put them into my mouth and started to try to pull out my teeth,’ said the witness, ‘but he slipped and pulled a lump of my gum out instead.’ He was then beaten before Richardson held an electric fire against his genitals. Cigarettes were applied to his arms and chest. He was then wrapped in tarpaulin, ‘taken for a ride’ and dumped. After all that, Eddie Richardson apologised to him – saying they’d made a mistake and had got the wrong man.

Another victim described how he was invited to Camberwell for a chat about the whereabouts of someone Charlie was hunting. ‘He came up and stuck a thumb in each of my eyes and ordered me to take my shoes and socks off,’ the winess told the court. ‘Leads were attached to my toes and I got some violent shocks.’ Richardson then plunged a knife through his foot and into the floor beneath.

Yet another witness told the court that he had had his toes broken with pliers. Afterwards he could hear the screams of another man being tortured. One businessman said when he heard that Richardson wanted to speak to him he fled to
Heathrow but was so terrified that he was unable to form the words to buy an air ticket.

The Old Bailey trial began in April 1967. Despite an attempt to bribe a juror, Charlie was found guilty of grievous bodily harm, demanding money with menaces and robbery with violence. He was jailed for 25 years, while Eddie had another ten years added to his existing sentence. Six other gang members were also jailed. The judge, Mr Justice Lawton, told the Richardsons: ‘You terrorised those who crossed your path in a way that was vicious, sadistic and a disgrace to society. One is ashamed to think one lives in a society that contains men like you. You must be prevented from committing further crime. It must be made clear that all those who set themselves up as gang leaders will be struck down, as you have been struck down.’

Like the Kray brothers, Charles Richardson was later to issue an apologia for his crimes. He said: ‘The men I was involved with were professional swindlers. I was only trying to get my own money back. I feel sick about the way I have been portrayed. I’m a scapegoat. I got 25 years for grievous bodily harm and not one of them needed an aspirin.’

He was also at pains to deny stories that had emerged about his links with the South African secret service, BOSS – and there was even talk of an attempt to bug the telephone of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Richardson told the
Sunday Times
in 1983 that his links with South Africa and the shadowy BOSS had been an embarrassment to the British government. ‘I was a pawn,’ he said. ‘The bigger a criminal the British made me out to be, the more leverage they could apply on the South Africans for having used me. Most business is pressure and blackmail, isn’t it? I never tapped Harold Wilson’s phone. It could have been done but it wasn’t. But people here
got very upset about that. They wanted to get rid of me for as long as possible.’

A vociferous campaign for his early release was launched by Charlie Richardson’s family and friends, backed by parole board reports stating that he was no longer a danger to society. They fell on deaf ears. In 1980 he walked out of an open prison and went on the run for almost a year, supposedly to campaign for his early release as a ‘reformed citizen’. He even dressed up as Father Christmas and handed out presents at a children’s party. When he finally gave himself up and returned to prison, he was allowed out on a day-release scheme to work with the disabled.

In 1983, anticipating his early release within a year or two, he was allowed home for a long, quiet weekend to prepare himself for life again on the outside. A preview of the lifestyle befitting one of the biggest ex-crooks in London was revealed when he was collected at the gates of Coldingley open prison, Berkshire, by a Rolls-Royce. He was driven home for a family reunion, then treated his relatives, including his freed brother Eddie, to a champagne lunch. Over the following days, the festivities continued at pubs and clubs in Southeast London, where members of the public thronged the bars to pay their respects to the villain. ‘Look around you,’ he told reporters. ‘I love these people and they love me. I get 200 Christmas cards a year in jail – that’s what a bad man I am.’

Charles Richardson was finally freed from prison in July 1984. It was Eddie’s turn to go back inside when in 1990 he was given another long stretch for his involvement in a £70 million cocaine and cannabis heist. He was sentenced to 35 years but released after 12. In later years, the brothers who once ruled half a city fell out. They became estranged after Eddie
accused Charlie of ‘ripping him off’ over business deals during Eddie’s time in prison.

Charlie Richardson, 78, died in a Kent hospital in September 2012 with his wife and five children at his bedside. He contracted blood poisoning following a gall bladder complaint. His brother Eddie said: ‘I haven’t spoken to him in years. I can’t say he was a good father, but he was a father. He leaves a big family behind him.’