|
Back to Part 3
Charlie and Eddie Richardson had started off as a
couple of young lads from Camberwell. Their parents were honest working
class people but the boys were a bit of a handful and they piled up the
usual slate of juvenile convictions. Left to their own devices, they
probably would never have been anything much more than scrap metal dealers
and hirers of fruit machines but I think they would have been successful
whatever they did. They may have gone on to become respected millionaires,
working-class boys made good but, as far as being a criminal organization is
concerned, they were created by corrupt police.
(I believe the same is true with the Kray brothers in the East End,
though I never served there, but) I know that the Richardsons could
never have grown to become so powerful or accumulate such immense influence
without their tame policemen.
But in reality, it wasn’t the policemen who were
tame. On the contrary, the police regarded them, the Richardsons, as tame.
In other words, we could deal with them. They were our boys. For the most
part we controlled them. They weren’t an independent operation, they were a
subsidiary, an appendage, of the local police. There was so much talk of
gangs and organized crime but all the time there was another far bigger
criminal organization, only it wasn’t called a gang. The public knew it
colloquially by the name of its headquarters building as that much-revered
institution, Scotland Yard. More precisely, it was the Criminal
Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police. But to those in the
know, it was called ‘the Firm’.
The Firm was Us. Sure, criminals used to see us
as their mortal enemy, just like they did in British B movies of the day,
but that wasn’t because of our dedication to wiping out crime. It was
because we were their greatest competitors. At that time crooks often used
to say things like, ‘Cor, I wish I was on your Firm’, as they handed over
yet another wadge of money. They each had their own little firms, and when
they were gossiping to us about rival outfits, they would say, ‘Oh, so and
so's got a nice little firm up’, or, ‘I was in this pub and in came this
little firm...’. ‘Little firms’ was a common expression for what the press
or the public were calling gangs, whereas the members of these little firms
used to call all of us in the CID, The Firm. That's how the
expression arose back in the 1950s and 1960s when London’s CID was the
biggest criminal organisation in the whole of Britain. And no other firm -
be it the Krays, the Richardsons or the Freddie Foreman mob - could ever
have existed without our Firm.
We used to look at it this way. There's only one
Firm, and that’s us. The rest are minor firms operating under licence from
us. But when they become embarrassing, or the word goes out that their
licences have expired, we put them down, as major firms have always put down
minor firms. It's as simple as that.
Of course, in the later 1960s newspapers were
full of banner headlines and sensational stories about gang warfare in
London, especially between the Krays and Richardsons, but all these stories
were being orchestrated by the master organisation for organised crime in
the capital: Scotland Yard itself. It was the Pot calling the Kettle black.
As for most lowly detectives on the ground, such as myself, we were either
knaves or fools. Either we were at it ourselves or we turned a blind eye to
what was going on around us. And Boy! Was a lot going on! We thought we were
untouchable, indestructible. We were young men, most of us fit as fiddles,
enjoying the best sports facilities and health care, and we did not even
wear uniforms. We went around in plain clothes, we always had cars and
drivers at our disposal, and we had a job where we could go anywhere, do
anything and get away with it. We could ignore the law because, quite
simply, we were the law.
So myself and my CID colleagues, if we took a
dislike to you, it would be quite easy for us to find some cannabis in your
pocket. Or we might swear blind in court that we found you alone on
Hampstead Heath, with your trousers down (though we did see another man
running away whom we failed to catch) and that you were flashing or
importuning - but the whole story would be a fabrication. Can you see how
dangerous it is? Where you have a group of people who would back each other
up, tell lies on oath, and, dressed up in smart suits and looking the part,
probably be believed in court. And no matter how much you complain or what
lawyers you get, you are going to be convicted of importuning, flashing,
having dope in your pocket or even - hypocrisy of hypocrisies - attempting
to bribe a police officer!.
As crooked police, we were more powerful than the
most fantastic criminals you could imagine - the Krays, Richardsons,
everyone else put together - because we could take away anyone's liberty at
any time, on any pretext, for any reason, twisted mentally or otherwise.
That was the power - and neither I nor my colleagues should ever have had it
because power corrupts. For a time I believed my position was untouchable,
invincible. I could do what I like, say what I like, break any law I liked,
hurt anybody I like. If I had a violent disposition, I could punch anyone in
the face, and then take them to court and charge them with assaulting me.
That was the power and a lot of people knew we
had it, they felt it daily, especially crooks. Yes, the Richardsons could
terrify little villains around Peckham and Camberwell but only because we
sub-contracted petty justice to them, mucky work but wholly necessary and a
form of public service which served almost everybody’s interests. It worked
like this. There was a sort of relationship between gangsters and the police
which ensured that, even in the roughest neighbourhoods, it was safe for old
ladies to walk the streets. I'm not saying they could leave their doors open
but at least if some villain or psycho from outside the area moved into
Peckham or Camberwell and started hitting old ladies on the head or raping
young girls, then the Richardsons and any other local firm would sort him
out in their own way. And in time, when the criminal fraternity realised
that the Richardsons had secured such a hold on the area, only a complete
crazy would be so foolish as to go into their territory and do things like
that, because they were sure to be ‘seen to’.
If there was a crime of a particularly horrific
nature, like a little girl being abducted, the criminals were just as
outraged as the police and the public, so the criminals would do whatever
they could to track down that child molester. Several serious, ‘out of
order’ crimes as Charlie Richardson would say, were solved only with
assistance from those quarters. All of a sudden there would be a phone call
telling us where we could find the molester. By the time we found them, the
molesters themselves might be in a dreadful state because the locals had
taken justice into their own hands. This vigilante action operated even
against people who had attacked the police. If a copper had been slashed
across the face, someone from our Firm would go and see the Richardsons and
very soon the attacker would be fingered and handed over. Perhaps the
‘criminal fraternity’ gave up such maverick offenders for their own peace
and quiet, because otherwise the police would harass a lot of ‘straight’
crooks. In a case like that, we were sure to come down on every villain in
the neighbourhood. We would get a mass of search warrants and turn them all
over, rush into all their drinking dens and stop and search every ‘face’.
Maybe it was to avoid that, maybe it was self-preservation, but I think it
was more than that. It was all part of a system of give-and-take between the
acknowledged crime bosses and the senior police officers in the same area.
Symbiosis - that’s what academics and sociologists call this nowadays. For
us it was a case of, ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’.
So when older people seem to wax sentimental and
say that a lot of the nasty things that happen now, on the streets of
London, wouldn't be happening if the Richardsons or Krays were still around,
they aren’t talking total nonsense, because those gangs really did operate
their vigilante justice under our authority and control. They did it through
us, for the benefit of the wider community. Today none of this would be
tolerated, and quite right too, but remember that it was only when all these
big gangs were broken up around 1970 that street crime began to get out of
hand, leading to the appalling fear of crime among wide sections of the
community which now mean many people are too frightened to go out at nights.
As one senior officer said to me back in the mid-1960s when both the police
and the gangs were coming under increasing media attack, ‘If this goes on,
these people will get the police force they deserve, and it won’t be a force
that can keep the lid on crime. The statistics will go through the roof’.
And so they have.
But of course even though the Richardsons helped
keep down the crime rate for particularly abhorrent anti-social offences.
they did not keep down the crime rate for lorry heists, long firm frauds,
scrap metal thefts and all the other things they were up to themselves.
Sure, they helped keep the streets safe, but in return they expected to be
left alone to control and discipline all the other gangs in the area. There
was a stage where no criminal could do anything in Camberwell without them
knowing. If you were a villain and you wanted to start anything illegal,
they would want a share. If you were sensible, you went and got their
permission in advance. You would say, ‘Look, I'd like to set up a long
firm’, and they would give you a licence to do it. On the other hand, if
they discovered - as they surely would discover - that you were doing
something without their permission and not cutting them in, their tough guys
would come round saying, ‘Charlie wants to see you’. And he'd talk to you
about it. If you were lucky, he'd just take a percentage. If you were
unlucky he'd take the whole blooming lot.
The Richardsons never did over the pavement
‘blags’. Sure, they used to profit from robberies, by taking a share of
them, but neither Charlie nor any of his clan ever donned a mask and steamed
into a bank with a sawn-off shotgun. They were ‘blaggers’ in the other sense
of the term: they ponced off hardworking villains who would spend months
plotting up a robbery, only to have half the proceeds taxed off them because
Charlie had found out who had done it. He had to have his share or else...
well, it never had to be spelled out because next day a local detective
might be spotted in Charlie’s company and who knows what whispers might pass
between them.
The Richardsons were not so much thieves as
entrepreneurs profiting from other people’s thefts. They did quite well
buying stolen lead off totters, who would come in with a gunny sack stuffed
with lavatory overflow pipes, but they were using their scrapyards to
receive whole lorry loads of stolen goods. That’s how they became
‘receivers’, they received stolen goods, but sometimes even they could be
made fools of. An informant of mine was with them one night when a couple of
cheeky associates phoned up, claiming they had a lorry full of fur coats but
the lorry had broken down so they were going to abandon it but did the
Richardsons have any other ideas. This sent Charlie and Eddie into a
salivating flap, trying to work out a way to rush over to the other side of
London and put this lorry on tow, or transfer the furs, without getting
caught. This particular caper was a huge hoax which no doubt sent the
hoaxers into fits of laughter, as this was just the sort of business which
the Richardsons really did get away with, week in week out. If you had
stolen a load you could phone them up, and they would take it off your
hands. They had outlets in dozens of street markets and crooked shops. With
such a distribution network, they could handle huge quantities of stolen
goods which lesser firms could not.
My own association with the Richardsons began
after I was posted to St Mary Cray on the edge of south east London. Charlie
and Eddie had both bought large homes in St Mary Cray area - they no longer
lived in the hunched-up streets of Camberwell. By chance I acquired some
very reliable sources within their gang so, on occasion, I was able to give
Ken Drury, information about what they were up to, which even Ken would not
have known about from his own sources. Or so I first thought.
I quickly learned that they were no fools. They
were hard-working, industrious, shrewd and far cleverer than most other
criminals. They were organisers, they had good business brains and, although
they leeched off other villains, they also made money themselves. At the
same time they were violent and were prepared to use violence against anyone
that dared set up in opposition. Even so, they were well thought of by
Camberwell people because, like the old-style Mafia godfathers were supposed
to be, the Richardsons would help ordinary citizens in trouble. If you were
being threatened or someone was taking a liberty, the Richardsons would
help.
In return Camberwell people were generally loyal
to the Richardsons and never breathed a word of their criminal activities to
the police. You would have thought there would have been a constant flow of
information about businesses which operated so publicly - with lorry loads
of stolen metal going in and out of their yards, and other forms of stolen
property being recycled - but no information ever came in.
Nowadays everyone talks of the Richardsons as if
they were a monstrous gang of torturers, but they didn't go round bullying
Camberwell residents or whacking city gents. Certainly they beat up the odd
small-time crook who tried to ‘take a liberty’, but that was normal. They
helped make the streets safe for old ladies but not for young men whose own
idea of a good night out was a good fight. When I first knew Eddie
Richardson, that was exactly his game. He'd fight anybody, it was a joy to
him. He was like that from the first moment I saw him in a dance hall in
Streatham. I used to go there when I was off-duty, having a night out, and I
used to see many a fight going on where Eddie just knocked someone down and
that was the end of it. He had old-fashioned principles. If he knocked you
down, and if you said, ‘Alright, alright, I've had enough, it would be all
over. You would have a wash-and-brush-up, and then go and have a drink with
him at the bar, and from then on you would be friends. It was like being
back at school, where you would have a fight with a lad, and afterwards he
would be your best buddy. You'd establish some sort of bond. That was Eddie.
And if there was a really huge fight going on,
and everyone else on his side was retreating in one direction, Eddie would
whoop with joy and charge back into the enemy, swapping punches in all
directions. Yet even in this kind of warfare, if he knocked a chap down, he
didn't start kicking him in the head and face or break his ribs. He would
just walk away. He was a clean fighter. He would stop, the fight was over,
it was won.
In that sense Camberwell, along with the rest of
working-class London, was a violent society, where people used to get
whacked or smacked for minor infringements, and accept it. This was
especially true if the whacking and smacking came from the police, who must
have been dishing it out ever since the Met was set up in 1829. Long before
my time, your friendly neighbourhood bobby would roll up his cape and hit
petty offenders round the ear. We were still being issued with these
old-style capes and I found that with one swing, a rolled-up cape could
knock hooligans over and really injure them. Meantime it was common for a
policeman to take his coat off, pile in and give someone a hiding. Violence
was accepted as a way of life and you would often see squabbles being
settled with flying punches. It was only when the pugs resorted to broken
glasses and bottles and ultimately knives that it became nasty.
But if, by chance, someone ever did complain
about any of the Richardsons’ activities, be it a good Saturday night
beating from Eddie or something more criminal, that's where the police
protection came in. And the policeman who oversaw this protection was none
other than my boss at the regional crime squad, Ken Drury. Later he would
become notorious and be jailed for eight years, but when I worked for him he
was at the height of his honest thief-taking reputation.
I thought the world of Ken Drury. He was a big
man in many ways, not only physically but in voice, manner and character. He
needed a young detective as his regular driver and I was given the job He
took a liking to me and I spent a lot of time in his company. I admired him
and I liked to be with him because he was very knowledgeable, a walking
encyclopaedia about crime in London. He knew more about who was doing what
and what was going on than any other policeman I ever met. We were together
for years and became friends, even though he was far senior to me and much
older. I also spent a lot of time in his company off-duty, but, as grafting
detectives, we were never off-duty. When work was finished in the office,
Ken and I used to go off and usually end up in nightclubs or shady bars.
Wherever we went, we never paid for anything. I just used to follow in
behind Ken and everything was free: meals, drinks, as much as you wanted,
even in the smartest West End clubs and casinos. If we wanted to gamble -
and we often did - people would always come along and give us a handful of
chips. ‘Go and have a spiel’, they’d say, and when we had lost those chips,
up they would come again: ‘Have another handful’. Of course, if we won, we
used to cash up and keep our winnings. It was a pay-off, of course, barely
concealed, but this was the way Ken worked. In all these establishments he
knew people who would tell him the latest on whatever crime or criminals he
was pursuing at the time - or which, they thought, he ought to know about.
I’m sure he enjoyed these outings as relaxation but he also used them to get
a lot of information.
As a result he became a prolific thief-taker,
winning promotion all the way up to commander of the Flying Squad. Even so,
many of his colleagues regarded him as a buffoon. He knew that and didn't
care. He was very gregarious and he liked to be handed triple gins with
tonic and ice and lemon, eat a big dinner, and smoke a big cigar. He loved
that sort of life, and to be talking slang with people who were his doubles
- big, loud mouthed, crude, confident, couldn't care less - except that they
were major criminals. Ken was a man's man, and that's why he got on so well
with gangsters. He was like them, a cockney from humble beginnings, but he
had made his way and he had respect. Some of them could have been his
brothers, the way they went on. And I felt out of it. Well, I was only the
driver.
Some people used to say, how on earth could a man
like that have got where he did, because he wasn’t very educated, he was
loud-mouthed, and crude in personal ways. If you were a sensitive soul, you
could be very upset by the sort of things he might say. You might even feel
destroyed. His nickname was ‘Trumpet’ because he was always bellowing across
the office or down the phone in his loud voice but I assure you, he was no
buffoon. He was very shrewd and he didn't mind being regarded as a buffoon -
not that I would ever have called him a buffoon, either to his face or
behind his back. He's dead now, and you can call any dead man a buffoon, but
no-one ever dared say that to his face, when he was boss of the flying
squad.
Yes, of course, he was corrupt but then we were
all corrupt. Why single out Ken Drury? Just consider that some of the people
who went on to occupy the very highest positions at Scotland Yard joined the
CID at the same time as I did, when - barring a few individuals who swam
against the tide - anybody who was appointed to the CID had to be corrupt.
It's possible that when there were clamp-downs some people had religious
conversions and - Abracadabra! - they weren't corrupt any more. A lot of
those people applied for, and got, jobs on anti-corruption squads which were
a safe haven, but they had been corrupt in the beginning. The difference
between them and Ken was that he caught major villains. Who did they ever
lock up?
It was only when I started driving Ken round
south London that I realised that among his circle of criminal chums were
none other than the Richardson brothers. It has been said that Ken was their
minder, though the brothers deny it, and I could see for myself that he must
have established a relationship with them, years before when they were
nothing but Camberwell scrap dealers, and he was then the detective sergeant
at Camberwell, At that time there were scrap dealers down every back alley,
totters with carts collecting bits of lead. Most were minor villains, so how
did the Richardsons emerge as major ones? Probably due to Ken Drury
‘minding’ them, looking after their interests. He kept them safe from the
petty aggravations of his CID colleagues, while ensuring that their rivals
were sent to jail.
Ken had a two way relationship with the
Richardsons. He was helping them by eliminating their competition and they
were helping him with money or information. I must say that I never saw
anyone giving Ken money. I used to see him with these gangsters, but even if
he was taking money from them, they weren't silly enough to do the deal in
front of a young sprog detective. It was out of my class. But I am sure
that, if he did take money, it wasn't small sums. If Ken was doing favours
for the Richardsons, he wasn't doing it out of the kindness of his heart, or
because he liked Charlie Richardson's face. The way things were in those
days there had to something in it for Ken!
But however much he took in cash, I am equally
sure that to him the information they supplied would have been far more
valuable. This would have been information about other criminals, for there
is no gang - no top-line criminal, no criminal enterprise - whose success
cannot be attributed in part to knocking off the opposition. That’s what
drug dealers are doing now. Most of the information on drugs comes from
other drug dealers who want rival dealers put away and removed from
competition. It was the same then with lorry loads of stolen scrap metal. If
it had not been for Ken Drury, some other gang would have become the
overlords of south London instead of the Richardsons who would never have
got anywhere without his protection. They would have got nowhere, if he
hadn’t looked after their interests.
Not that this did them any good in the long run.
If they had never received any ‘help’ from Ken and other bent detectives,
they might now be respected pillars of the community, comfortably retired in
villas in the sun, instead of notorious gangsters, unjustifiably bracketed
with the psychopathic Kray twins. If the Richardsons had not been given
licences by Drury & Co, they would not have fallen so far.
As for me, after a couple of years of advanced
corruption training by Ken Drury, it was time for me to take my own step up
the CID ladder. I now had enough 'service' to become a sergeant but, before
I could apply for that promotion, I had to take the sergeant’s examination.
You may feel by now that there was no form of corruption which I had not
encountered at first hand, and there was nothing left to shock me, But
everything was so corrupt, this did not matter because the sergeant's exam
papers were up for sale. They were being sold by the superintendent who was
setting the questions! And beyond that the inspector’s exam papers were for
sale too!
Well, once we had ‘passed’ these exams, we all
‘had it made’ because, beyond the rank of inspector, there were no more
exams. After that it was promotion by selection board all the way up to the
top of the tree. Now your future is entirely in the hands of people who are
a rank or two above you but who know you as partners, buddies, and
fellow-shareholders in the Firm. That's why it was so important to keep in
with your colleagues, because, if you didn't behave the way they wanted you
to behave, you wouldn’t get promoted.
And to me promotion mattered far more than money.
If I had been really corrupt - which I wasn't - I could have become a very
wealthy man. I could have lined my pockets in a big way but I didn't. I was
just trying to get on in the CID. Well, you won’t be surprised to hear that,
not only did I sail through the exam, I was immediately promoted to
sergeant. This itself was a sign of favour because passing the sergeant’s
exam was no guarantee that you would ever reach that rank. Many people had
to wait years for promotion. For some it never came. More curious still, I
was posted to Ken Drury’s old stamping ground, Camberwell and I’m sure Ken
had a lot to do with me going there. It was a ‘laying on’ of hands, an
apostolic succession. He had engineered this posting so I could look after
his Camberwell interests, notably his interests with the Richardsons. He had
looked after them and allowed them to grow. Now as he went off to Scotland
Yard to head the Flying Squad, he needed someone on the ground in the heart
of his old empire to watch his back and theirs.
And so by the mid-1960s I was a detective
sergeant at Camberwell where I had almost unlimited power. I was lord of all
I surveyed because Camberwell was a ‘sergeants station’: we were just four
sergeants, there was no one above us, we worked in two shifts and had a
dozen detectives under us. And we inherited the status of everyone that had
been before us, which meant that in Camberwell we could do what we liked. We
could put anyone away: we could pick them up, lock them up and then get them
put in prison. Or we could pick them up and not put them in prison: we could
let them go or we could let them have bail. If we didn't want to dirty our
hands, we could arrange for certain people to be beaten up or terrified by
our sub-contractors. It was a ridiculous power to give anybody, particularly
people of our relative youth and inexperience. We got over-confident. We
felt no one could touch us. I could walk down Camberwell High Street and do
anything. And this was only Camberwell. There were many other stations where
the same thing went on. And as people went on up the rank structure -
inspector, superintendent, commander - this feeling must have become
thoroughly intoxicating.
There we were, a pack of unsupervised young men
who could have nicked anyone, even the Richardsons, despite the insurance
policy they held with Ken Drury. And they knew it. After all, they were just
human beings - walking the streets, living in houses like anybody else - so
they were vulnerable to a corrupt policeman. I'm not talking about half
crowns in pockets, I'm talking about the totally corrupt man, who has spent
years perjuring himself, getting innocent people locked up in jail. And how
it corrupts. When you start off, you can justify it: ‘Yes, I'm telling lies
but it's all for the benefit of the state. These are bad men anyway. He's a
crook. We know he did it’.
But then it comes to the personal thing: ‘He's
given me a funny look in the pub. I think I'll fit him up’. I’ll even tell
him, ‘I'm going to fit you up’. Then, if the chap’s street wise, he’s
terrified, because he knows that he will be fitted up. So then probably
he’ll send in someone to speak up on his behalf, a local bookmaker or
publican, some sort of middle man. ‘Oh don't fit up old so-and-so, he's
sorry now and he wants to know if he can buy you a drink. He's not a bad
lad, you don't have to fit him up’. Or the fool himself would say, ‘Ah, fit
me up then. Do your worst!’. Well, that's all right with me, and the next
thing he finds himself doing seven or eight years in prison for some
nonsensical made-up offence.
I hadn’t been at Camberwell very long when I
started getting phone calls from Ken Drury asking me to sort out problems
that had arisen with Richardson people or their enterprises on the manor.
This I did. I soon realised that the Richardsons were into a new line of
crime for them: long firm fraud. A ‘long firm’, otherwise known as an LF, is
when fraudsters start up a business or, even better, take over a going
concern which isn’t doing too well but still has credit lines with suppliers
of quite valuable goods. The fraudsters then place small orders with these
suppliers, for a couple of dozen of this or that and pay on the dot. If the
suppliers ask for references, the fraudsters show false references or
references naming another bent enterprise which they also control, using one
dodgy outfit to give credibility to another. Now they build up the size of
their orders, bigger and bigger, but simultaneously they delay payment, or
they pay off just enough to keep things going. Eventually they are doing
this to umpteen suppliers, only by now they are shifting goods at
rock-bottonm prices. Say, they are due to pay the supplier £10 per item but
they are selling it for £5 to a market trader to unload on the public
immediately at less than the £10 which the Richardsons are supposed to pay
wholesale. Naturally the goods are selling like hot cakes. So now they have
pushed their orders to the limit, they have all the credit they can get,
they owe perhaps one hundred thousand pounds, they suddenly place a massive
order and pay by cheque. And then - dear me! - the cheque bounces.
Meantime overnight the fraudsters have cleared
the warehouse, taken everything out, removed all the books, and extinguished
all sign that such a business has ever been there. They might even have
burned down the warehouse. All this time the suppliers have kept writing
letters until they turn up to find either a burnt-down shell or a place
which has been cleared out and closed up, or maybe some other business
entirely on the premises. As for the fraudsters, they have vamoosed with
hundreds of thousands of pounds from this one operation. That's a long firm
fraud.
One fraud property run by the Richardsons was
right next to Camberwell police station. We knew it was a long-firm and we
used to go in and help ourselves. It was selling everything you could
imagine: boxes of shoe polish up to the ceiling, stockings, cigarettes,
Schick pens, razors, whatever they had swindled out of suppliers. There was
another long-firm going inside the Elephant and Castle shopping centre when
it first opened. This was a perfect place because the fraudsters could
impress the representatives of the firms that were going to be ‘done’. They
would turn up and see this business trading alongside reputable stores like
Boots and Woolworths, and think the fraudsters must be legitimate too.
Where were the police in all this? There were
usually little notes attached to the CID notice board: ‘Any complaints about
such and such a firm, please pass to DC so-and so’. This was necessary
because, when we had these long-firm fraud premises on our ground, we knew
that sooner or later the supplier of a thousand dozen tins of boot polish
would realise he has been ‘done’, discover the premises have been shut down,
and storm into the nearest police station. So whenever there were LFs on our
territory, we made sure that the uniformed sergeant downstairs referred any
complaints directly to us folks in the CID upstairs. By rights these
complaints should have gone to the main Metropolitan or City fraud squads
which had special units to investigate this kind of racket, but instead our
local CID unit made sure these frauds were handled by junior officers who
had no idea of how to investigate a fraud. This guaranteed they never got
anywhere and the suppliers never got any satisfaction. They just had to
write off their losses.
If challenged, the investigating officer could
always say he was correlating a number of complaints about the firm in
question before sending them all to the fraud squad. But, of course, if he
never sends anything to the fraud squad, it will never know. Sometimes, the
suppliers would have the sense to employ their own experienced investigators
who would complain directly to the fraud squad. In that situation the fraud
squad would ask you for the papers and you just sent them up, spluttering
that you were just about to do this anyway.
When the Richardsons were doing LFs, Charlie
always used plausible front men. He wouldn't stand there himself, in the
front of the shop or warehouse, taking deliveries or making orders. Not
every LF on the manor was one of Charlie’s. It could be run by some other
villain who had got a licence from Charlie and was giving him a slice of the
revenues. Meantime Camberwell Police Station would be quietly shielding all
these enterprises, according to Ken Drury’s benign guidance from his Flying
Squad redoubt at Scotland Yard.
A time would come when not even Ken could protect
the Richardsons. In the end it wasn’t one of these highly lucrative frauds
that did for them but good old-fashioned gangland thuggery. The roots of
their downfall lay in a confrontation which had occurred back in Catford in
1966 That was what brought everything to a head. The trouble started with
what seemed little more than a punch-up. It proved to be ‘a punch-up too
far’. Guns were used, a couple of people were shot, and one man was killed.
It all happened at Mr Smith’s in Catford, a club
which was popular with police and criminals. Many a time I've been into a
pub or club and the customers have nearly all been police and criminals,
mixing freely, buying each other drinks, though usually the criminals were
doing the buying. Mr Smiths was one such club. I remember only one bit of
trouble there, when I was with my chief inspector Bert Guiver. Someone said
something out of order to Bert, so Bert said to this chap, ‘Well I'll fix
you up’ - and the man, tough guy though he was, drunk though he was,
collapsed before my eyes. Everyone who saw this was most concerned because
when a police officer of Bert Guiver's rank issued such a threat, it had to
be taken very seriously. When a detective chief inspector said, ‘I'll fix
you up’, they had no doubt that they could be fitted, so intermediaries got
to work to take the heat out of the exchange and calm things down.
The rest of the time it was a good atmosphere
until, according to our investigation, several gangs wanted to provide
protection for Mr Smith’s. Till that point Flash Harry Haward and another
gang had been doing the protection, but the owner wasn't satisfied and gave
the job to the Richardsons. So the Richardsons went down to take over.
I was on duty at Catford police station,
(Divisional 'Q' Car) the night it happened, a Monday, 7 March. In came a
phone call about an affray. I went straight to the scene where it was clear
that guns had been used. At the start it all looked pretty simple and the
officers handling the case expected to sort it out just like this. Someone's
been killed. Right, who fired the shot? Arrest him, charge him with murder.
Eddie Richardson’s been shot in the leg, somebody else has been shot, arrest
the shooter, charge him with grievous bodily harm. End of story. But that
was when someone in our police hierarchy decided it wouldn’t be enough to
put a couple of low-grade gunmen away. Somebody really big must go to jail
too, and it has to be the Richardsons.
And that was the beginning of the end for the
whole set up. When there are dead bodies about, when respectable members of
the public hear gunshots on the streets, and find bleeding gangsters
prostrate in their front gardens crushing their precious daffodils, that's
when the police are forced to act. Only, even now, there was a problem for
the top cops who seized overall charge of the case. They had to start using
their brains because the fact that a few Richardson gang members were
involved in a punch-up, even one that had ended in a murder by gunshot,
wasn't enough to put the entire gang away - especially as Eddie appeared to
be a victim, not an aggressor. Even more inconvenient for those who wanted
to make a really spectacular arrest, at the time of the incident Charlie,
the brains of the gang, was three thousand miles away in South Africa.
And so it was decided to puff the whole thing up.
‘Inside stories’ were leaked to Scotland Yard’s crime reporter toadies in
Fleet Street who dressed it up to look like a law-and-order crisis.. There
were headlines about gang warfare right across London. I’m not saying there
wasn’t gang warfare. It’s just that for years many of these same reporters
had supinely connived in portraying London as being policed by greatest
force in the world, incorruptible ‘untouchables’ who always got their man.
Now suddenly it was in the Yard’s interests to spread the gang warfare
gospel, and Fleet Street duly preached the word.
This happened to coincide with the ambitions of
one of the investigating officers who seized the chance to boost this seedy
little incident up way beyond anything it deserved. If you arrest one man
for shooting that's nothing, it's not going to get you a promotion, but, if
you can turn the one shooting into major gang warfare, then whoever's in
charge of that case is going to get kudos. And police detectives court
publicity. I've known many a detective who had very close contacts with
reporters who were only too anxious for stories to go with the detective’s
name. That way the reporter gets a story and the detective gets himself
noticed and stands out from the pack.
And so the word went out to ‘get the
Richardsons’, and by now no-one, not even Ken Drury could help them. He had
risen through the ranks of the CID in parallel with their rise through the
ranks of the underworld. It was the old story. You start off as a DC dealing
with one criminal, he becomes a major criminal supplying you with crucial
information about his rivals, and you end up as a chief superintendent or a
commander, more or less on the principle: ‘You scratch my back, I'll scratch
yours’. But for the criminal, the downside is that when your police
protector moves on, retires or dies, then you and your gang no longer have
that protection.
In the case of the Richardsons, Drury was still
in the force but he couldn't do much about it then because he was no longer
at Catford and he had no way of influencing the investigation into Mr
Smith’s. Also it has to be said that there had been a breakdown in the
gang’s management.The fact that Charlie was away in South Africa at the time
meant that certain people were allowed to get out of control. Charlie was a
man who controlled things but when the cat's away the mice will play. And
even Eddie was getting out of order because he had fallen into bad company.
He was running around with Frankie Fraser, who was the worst influence you
could wish on your worst enemy.
I know Frankie Fraser. At least, I did know him
when he was at his criminal height - or rather his depth because, as a
criminal, he was a failure. Anyone who spends forty years of his life
incarcerated in jails of one sort or another can’t be considered a success.
I've met him. He was charged over that fatal shooting at Mr Smith’s and I
was at his trial for murder when he was acquitted. Mad Frankie was a good
nickname for him because I think he really was mad. Probably still is,
because he would think nothing of seriously injuring anybody on any pretext
or on none. You've got tough guys who will say - as he breaks your leg -
it's just business, no hard feelings. He's being paid to break your leg and
that's it. But Frankie Fraser would pick on strangers walking past with
their briefcase, and little more than a newspaper in it, and batter them to
the ground for no reason. Fraser's contact with the Richardsons was part and
parcel of their eventual downfall. Before Frankie came on the scene Charlie
Richardson could always step in and sort out any little unpleasantnesses
which arose between minor members of his gang and other gangs or members of
the public, or he could he fix things directly with the police, but
Frankie’s violence was in a wholly different league which no-one, not even
Charlie’s senior police allies, could cover up for long.
In contrast Eddie had always been a fair fighter.
But when he came under the influence of Fraser, they just got carried away.
They were being violent to the wrong people. As long as they were violent to
small-time crooks in their own area, who would accept a beating and not
report it, or be too frightened to report it, or the incident would be
reported and a policeman would straighten it out, or the policeman would
speak to Charlie who would straighten it out, and probably give a small sum
of money to the injured person, that was all right. But when Charlie was
away and other people were supposed to be controlling things and they
didn't, the violent side ran away with them, and that was part of the reason
why eventually the whole lot were put away. It was still Charlie’s fault, of
course. Sure, for much of this time he was off in Africa trying to develop
mines, portraying himself as a legitimate multinational industrialist but he
can’t blame what went wrong entirely on underlings because he really was the
governor. The buck stopped with him. It was his gang and when he went away
on other jobs, other people were running riot. A lot of the violence was
associated with the fruit machines when they first came into Britain around
1962. And this was Eddie's side of the business.
If you've got a fruit machine, you've got a
licence to print money. People keep putting coins into it, but they only get
a fraction back. The takings were divided 50/50 between the machine’s owners
and the club or pub renting it, so you put in a good fruit machine in a good
club where people had plenty of money to spend, the profit could be a
hundred pounds or more in one evening. That's £50 each. Tax free. And I’m
talking about the 1960s when that was a lot of money, especially as the
machines used to cost no more than two or three hundred pounds. A lot of
them cost nothing because they had been stolen. Soon everybody wanted to be
in on that business but Eddie used to go along to clubs and pubs and advise
the managers to take his machines. He would have someone like Frankie Fraser
with him, and if a manager said no, then anyone else’s fruit machine in
there could be smashed up, along with the fellow himself. When word got
around about the Eddie-Frankie combination, people did not dare refuse.
Sometimes there were problems with the people who owned the machines that
were chucked out, but as Eddie and Frankie were more violent than everyone
else in the business, Eddie soon established a monopoly on fruit machines in
the area. And he started driving around in a Rolls Royce, he bought himself
a mansion in Chislehurst and he had other businesses, like a wholesale
chemist, and all sorts of fingers in many pies. People say Eddie was nothing
without his brother, but Eddie was a shrewd, hard-working, successful
businessman in his own right. He did business the way he knew best. There
was money to be made from installing fruit machines and he knew the way to
do it. And if it hadn’t been him and Frankie doing the violence, some other
roughie-toughie would have come along and slung out his fruit machines, and
bashed him when he complained. It had to be the law of the jungle.
If I had a pub in Camberwell and Eddie and
Frankie came in and said, ‘Look here, you're going to have our machine in’,
I would have had it in. Not because I might be frightened of them as
individuals but because I didn't want aggravation. I would be thinking, if I
don’t go their way I may have my windows smashed in, I may be fire-bombed,
hooligans may rush in and bash everybody. It wouldn't have been worth my
while to try and stand against them.
I had a very good informant who was present at
some of the beatings which Eddie and Frankie were handing out at this time
all over London. And that was part of the trouble: they went off their
patch. Eddie and Frankie could have carried on happily beating people up in
Camberwell right up until today but when they start turning up at London
nightclubs, in the City and the West End and other areas controlled by other
villains, that just wasn’t good underworld politics. On one occasion they
wanted to go into a club and the doorman would not let them in. The door was
on a latch and chain and Eddie punched through the gap between the door and
the chain so the doorman slammed the door on his arm. Result for Eddie?
Defeat and humiliation. But neither Eddie nor Frankie saw it like that
because they had begun to believe that the licence they had for running
crime in south-east London could extend all over London, even in areas ruled
by other gangs, protected by other bent policemen. And that's what brought
them down.
Even so, that kind of incident wasn’t going to be
enough to lock up the entire Richardson Clan for the twenty or thirty years
the authorities were now looking for. So that’s when all that stuff about
torture cropped up.
I believe many of the torture allegations were
fabricated. If the papers were drawn out now, and if the statements of the
alleged torture victims were subjected to the sort of forensic tests that
it's possible to do nowadays, I don't think they'd stand up. It could be
found that these statements were created, written, revised, changed and
chopped around, and altogether concocted by police who would give them to
the alleged victim to sign. If all that turned out to be what happened, the
whole case would have to be thrown out. In fact, after their trial the
Richardsons did try to claim they had been framed on false testimony, but of
course once they had been convicted and built up into monsters by the press,
their complaint never really saw the light of day. I knew one of the
officers who was working on the subsequent investigation and the
Richardsons’ claims were just treated with contempt.
A lot of people had told horrific stories against
the Richardsons, but it's dog eat dog isn't it? When you know the chap's
down, that’s when you put the boot in. Don't forget, the people that gave
evidence against the Richardsons were all crooks themselves and so they knew
which side their bread was buttered. If people are down and they're going
down, they're a lost cause, aren't they? You're not going to do yourself any
favours by sticking up for them, so you might as well go with the police
instead because, after all, we were still the real Firm.
And in Frankie Fraser they had the perfect
fall-guy. Because he was so crazy, so ‘mad’, anything anyone said against
him would be believed. So the police made this offer to all the front men in
the frauds: ‘Either you help us send them down or we'll do you for your role
in the long firm’. For sure, the Richardsons had ‘smacked’ these guys, as
they used to say, and they had smacked some frequently, but if that was all
they were accused of, they could have been charged only with assault or
grievous bodily harm. So that’s why everything had to be exaggerated -
‘hyped’ as they say nowadays - to ensure these people were locked up for
twenty years. That’s why all those tales were devised - the pliers in the
teeth, the nail through the foot, the electric torture box. I don't believe
any of this happened, because at that time I was working in an atmosphere of
‘anything to get them down’. Pressure here, pressure there, and these limp
whimp fraudsters were bound to co-operate. I'd done it myself many times to
other criminals, Later other people did it against me. It's very easy to
pressure someone to make a statement against another person, especially if
you belong to a ‘Firm’ like Scotland Yard. When you're taking a statement,
it's very easy to give it any meaning you like. If you're doing the writing
of the statement, and your witness is an ordinary person, you can influence
it any way you like.
The main reason the Richardsons were happy to
recruit Frankie Fraser was that they thought their main rivals, the Krays,
had teamed up with the Mafia. That's why Eddie and Charlie felt the need to
get some real muscle on the firm. Sure, they had stout lads but these were
basically scrapyard workers, they weren’t professional tough guys. What they
needed was hard cases like Cornell and Fraser who weren’t going to sweat or
soil their hands with hard work, breaking up cars or sawing things up, in a
dirty old pair of overalls. They were just there to frighten people.
I knew George Cornell by sight, he was on the
Richardson firm and he used a couple of little pubs in Camberwell, but he
was living in the Krays’ territory where he had the nerve to cheek them, and
insult them. I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to hear he had been shot
to death, in the Blind Beggar pub in Stepney in March 1966. It was on the
Krays’ turf and so we knew straightaway that it had to be the one of the
Krays who had killed him - especially as it was two days after the Krays had
lost one of theirs, Dickie Hart, at Mr Smith’s. Cornell was too brave, too
tough. That was his epitaph: ‘He had too much 'bottle' for his own good’.
Sure, Eddie himself was a tough guy, but he was a
just a rough-neck who liked a punch up. Even when he was a millionaire
through his fruit machines, even when he had his Rolls Royce and his mansion
in Chislehurst, he stayed the Camberwell street fighter He didn't change, he
was still the same guy I had first known many years earlier at the
dance-hall in Streatham and that's another reason why I don't believe the
torture tales. That kind of thing just wasn’t Eddie or Charlie, as far as I
know them.
But meantime, over the water, the Krays were
getting so powerful and threatening that the Richardsons felt the need for
protection. The Krays were complete lunatics, shooting and cutting people
up. They were lunatics who hurt just for the sake of it, so the Richardsons
had to get in their own lunatics to keep that lot at bay, And now they have
people hanging around who are really nasty, dangerous, murderous folk, who
carry guns and start killing people. And when Charlie went off abroad, the
uncontrolled combination of Eddie Richardson and Frankie Fraser turned into
a fatal cocktail, especially when they tried installing their fruit machines
all over London.
It was those machines that started the war
between the Richardsons and the Krays, because once Eddie had got a fruit
machine in every place in Camberwell, he wanted to move out and out and out.
His way of doing business? ‘Have my machine. What” you don’t want my
machine! So, what do you want? My machine or a punch in the eye? Take your
choice’. Well, of course, that was enough to persuade the pub landlord or
club manager to take the machine. So far, so good. But once Eddie moved into
the West End, he started infringing on the Krays who were also interested in
fruit machines by this time. The result was several uproarious
confrontations. First car loads of Krays would drive through Camberwell all
shouting, hooting out of windows, and then carloads of Richardsons lot would
drive into Kray territory, hooting and hollering right outside their clubs.
It’s said the Richardsons became sadists and
started electrocuting people but I don't believe a word of it. I'm quite
sure they whacked more than their share of people and they probably were
behind some more serious injuries, but I find it hard to imagine them
getting involved in psychological things and electric machines, reducing
people, to shivering wrecks. It's just not them.
The only people that would know the truth are
those who were present, but if you add those up you will find one person
saying he had his teeth pulled and nine or ten more saying it's a nonsense.
I'd go with the majority because during my military and police service and
especially during my life thereafter, I have met people who were
professional torturers. Some of them were very sophisticated people with
degrees in sciences of the mind, skilled people, who wouldn't dream of
leaning over and punching you in the face, any more than the Richardsons
would dream of hooking you up to various fiendish devices such as scrapyard
generators and electrocuting you. We’re talking about wholly different kinds
of people.
A torturer gets pleasure out of torturing people,
he would go on and on, he wouldn't stop when someone was down. Whereas these
roughie-toughie Richardsons, clean cut fighters in the back-street way, who
wouldn't dream of kicking an unconscious man in the face, are these the
brothers who are supposed to have indulged in fiendish tortures? Never. I
don't believe it - and neither does anybody else who knows them. In court,
it was clear to everyone but the judge and jury that the Richardsons were
fitted up from start to finish. Indeed they tried to get back by making a
detailed complaint afterwards but it went nowhere. By making complaints they
just made even more trouble for themselves, because the authorities used the
process of investigating complaints to harass families and friends, when
there was never a hope of that complaint being allowed to succeed, or an
appeal granted and the conviction overturned.
I didn't take a direct part in fitting up the
Richardsons but I know the fit-up went on. I assisted in the fit-up only by
taking statements and turning them certain ways. Remember this. As a member
of the public, whether you are a witness or a suspect, the only safe way to
make a statement is to write it yourself, or get your lawyer to write it,
because if you give a statement to a police officer, the meaning that's
going to come out may be quite different to the one you meant to give. And
that was how the police did for the Richardsons. As we were taking the
statements, we could get whatever result we wanted from them. That way
police can use honest, decent folk as part of the fit-up. It isn’t the
snivelling fraudster claiming he’s been tortured that convinces a jury but
the ancillary witnesses, upright citizens all, who will carry the day for
you in court and get people like the Richadsons locked up for decades.
The government put them away. The word went out
that they had to go. The whole business was political, to do with things
that Charlie Richardson had been getting up to with foreign secret services,
like the South African agency BOSS, including break-ins at politicians'
houses. Only they couldn't or didn't want to charge him with such activity
because Special Branch and the security services were also in it, up to
their necks. None of them wanted to put Charlie on trial at the Old Bailey
on espionage charges because they would have been very difficult to prove,
and dirt would have come out about MI5 and MI6 in the process. But then
Manna from Heaven! The Mr Smith’s shoot-out occurred, Scotland Yard was
pointed in the direction of the torture allegations and that was it. That's
why the Richardsons went down. It had nothing to do with torture at all, or
buying bent lead or because full-scale gang warfare was about to break out
between the Richardsons and Krays. They were fitted up for reasons of state,
and what better fall guys than Frankie Fraser and Eddie.
So that’s how our Firm, big and bent as it was,
could be bent several notches further by an even bigger firm, the state
itself. We put down the Richardsons, as major firms have always put down
minor firms, but we were merely tools in the game of nations.
Go to Part 5 |
