PART THREE

THE LAST GANGSTER
BY FREDDIE FOREMAN

 

 

We were at Table 4 in Wormwood Scrubs when I was doing my ten-stretch on the McVitie charge. There was a television right there in front of us, and one at the other end of the wing behind us. There were three hundred prisoners in there.

We ran the fucking wing; we kept it nice and sensible, we had our screws straightened and bringing in booze for us. We had a little scam with Gordon Goody going over to have his back massaged by this woman – she was a therapist. He had this poacher’s jacket made with all these pockets. When he’d come back, they’d search him but in the pockets were all these steaks and pork chops with the kidney in them.

While he’s having his massage behind a screen, all these other people are waiting their turn, the screws sitting there with them. We were all Cat-A’d up; I was double Cat-A. We worked in the laundry together – the best job in the fucking nick: you haven’t got to go out in all weathers.

Jimmy Hussey was the chairman of the film club and we’d select the films we wanted to see every week. So we lived all right; we survived it all.

We used to get a bit of mescaline in and trip out on a Friday night, because it was the only nick in the country that banged you up at half past five of a Friday and didn’t open up till the following morning. The governor said this was the time you could write your letters home to your families; that was what the idea was, so the screws could get away and have an early night. It was a very good scam, really! But, when I was in Leicester, the special units went on hunger strike because of the conditions we were living under: sleep deprivation. Every fifteen minutes they were checking you out in your cell, banging on the door if you didn’t show your hands and your face. They were switching your light on and off, too. Then they went to the next cell and unlocked the bolts on the door. You couldn’t have any sleep at all!

Then, on your visits, you’d have your visitors and your kids at one end, you at the other, and a screw with a notepad taking down everything you fucking said. The visits were terrible. We had to change into sterile clothing before we had one; they put metal detectors all over the visitors. If you put someone on your visitors’ list they went to their employers and checked them out. The security was fucking ridiculous!

They called Leicester prison ‘the Submarine’ because it was so claustrophobic. They put a false ceiling in the cells; daylight couldn’t come through the windows because there were so many fucking bars, as there had been an escape attempt. The exercise yard was just a cage as you went through a tunnel; one door opened and the other one didn’t – just like on the Security Express robbery. The conditions were so bad we all went on hunger strike; I ate nothing for twelve days, just had water. I could see my fucking ribs – I hadn’t seen them since I was about sixteen! I was so pleased when it was over. They changed our conditions; we tidied up the Cat-A system a lot, made it more liberal.

I’d just got out of my ten. Jimmy Hussey and I (that’s him sitting on the right, with fellow Train Robber Gordon Goody on the left – they hadn’t been home long, either) were opening up the Charlie Chaplin Club in Wardour Street, Soho.

It was all a bit hush-hush when we were taking it over; we’d been building up a nice clientele and having late drinking. We had a restaurant there, with some nice grub and a couple of girls. Maureen was behind the counter, with Jimmy’s wife, Jilly. Maureen had the experience of serving in my pub.

It’s going along lovely, but I’m going in there early one morning and I look at the placards on the pavement: ‘TRAIN ROBBER OPENS SOHO NIGHTCLUB’. Jimmy Hussey’s done an interview with the press.

Now, West End Central made themselves busy: if you were a minute over time you were fucking nicked, you’d lose your licence. They really put the pressure on us.

It was ridiculous because I was taking all the customers from the A&R Club late at night when they finished, when Mickey Regan and Ronnie Knight were running it in Charing Cross Road. I used to look after it when they had holidays; I’d run the club for them. They used to shut bang on time, but we would be there all night.

But the Charlie Chaplin Club was tucked away in an alleyway, a little court off Wardour Street. Upstairs was a walk-in bar and the club was downstairs. It was doing well, but the next thing you know we had all the headaches with the Old Bill and it just went downhill. Folded.

 

This is at a party at my house in Dulwich, in the early eighties. That’s Freddie Puttnam, my brother-in-law, on the left. Next to him is Stevie Ellison; he was a good little fighter whose parents lived next door to me. Those are the Hennessy brothers, Richard and Peter, on the right. But Peter got murdered: Paddy Onions stabbed him in the back at a boxing do. In return, Onions got shot outside his wine bar afterwards. Mickey Hennessy, the third brother, was shot in the neck because he was the danger man. Once his brother was killed, they tried to kill him as well, but he survived it.

Here, I’m going to Ronnie Knight’s wedding in Marbella, Spain, in June 1987. In the documentary Britain’s Greatest Robberies on the Crime & Investigation channel it’s got this footage of my Jamie and me walking to the wedding. It has the Bank of America robbery and the Brinks-MAT; the Security Express (which I was involved with) was on first – but I’m in it all the fucking way through! They’ve got family footage of when Gregory and Jamie were little kids, running around when I took them on holiday. I don’t know where they got it – someone must have sold it on to them.

Here’s Charlie Wilson (right), the Great Train Robber who was shot dead in 1990. I was in Brixton prison at the time. A lowlife who goes under the name Joe Flynn was interviewed and said I’d put a contract on Charlie over a drug deal. They tried to involve me again, but what Charlie was up to was nothing to do with me at all. Roy Adkins in Amsterdam was the one who put the contract on him, over Adkins’s name coming up. He was on his toes in Amsterdam and got Danny Roff from south London, who Charlie knew, to go and do it. Charlie’s wife Pat let him in: ‘Oh, he’s out on the porch.’ He just fucking walked round and shot Charlie, the bastard!

Of course, Roff got shot afterwards and crippled up. Later, when he was getting out of his wheelchair into his Mercedes, they shot him and finished the job. He didn’t survive much longer; nor did Adkins.

My Georgie (centre) was shot with a shotgun in 1964 and Jimmy Allen (left) was murdered. He had his brain smashed in with a crowbar when he was asleep, in 1986. Jimmy had scrap-metal yards – we used to get acetylene bottles off him for cutting open safes and he’d dispose of motors if we wanted one cut up. He was a lovely guy; he used to love looking at engines and motors down at Puerto Banús on the boats. He’d talk to the captains: ‘You’re burning too much oil there,’ he’d say, looking at the exhaust coming out of the ship. He was really knowledgeable. His yards sold for 600 grand; the council were buying them all up.

He earned a fortune.

The wicked bastard who killed him has never paid the price, although his son, Billy, was found guilty of defrauding £2 million from his father’s company (but not of hiring a hitman with intent to murder his father).

This is my first apartment in Alcazaba; I ended up owning four, including a luxurious penthouse split over two levels where I lived. Alcazaba was a top-class complex and I had amazing views out over the port to the sea.

I was one of the first to go to the ‘Costa Del Crime’ – in 1982, after I’d returned from the States and got a two-year suspended sentence in the Dukie Osbourne/Eddie Watkins case (see Part One). There’s my George on the right, when he was working with me, then Ronnie Everett, Johnny Mason and me. We were three of the ‘Costa Del Sol Five’ – the others being Ronnie Knight, who’d been nicked at this point, and Clifford Saxe.

They brought it all on top, the Knight family; they were being kept under observation in their pub, The Fox, before the Security Express robbery (at Shoreditch in the East End in 1983), and the fucking garage owner they went round to – John Horsley, who rolled over straightaway – had nowhere to put the money so he put it in his father-in-law’s council flat, in a ‘secret cupboard’.

My name never came into it at all until I was in the El Alcazaba complex in Puerto Banus, Marbella, buying a flat there. Once I settle in, Ronnie Knight comes and moves in – he got a villa up the fucking road! Admittedly, it’s down in Fuengirola, but he’s coming down to Puerto Banús, getting drunk and driving home. He came off the road and a tree stopped him and his wife Sue going down the canyon; they’d have been dead otherwise. It was lucky – they got out the car and dropped fifteen feet to the fucking ground!

So then they come and tell me that they’ve bought this flat at the same place where I’m staying. The idea was to keep separate from each other, all along the coast – with Ronnie, Johnny Mason and myself split up, though Mason was next to Everett’s place. But Johnny Knight had been arrested, so we didn’t want Ronnie living next to me in the Alcazaba.

They came to interview Carlos, the manager of the Alcazaba complex: ‘Does Johnny Knight own any property in your development here?’

‘No, no, no, no!’ he said, so they put all their papers back into their briefcase. They go to the door and he says, ‘But Señor Ronnie Knight has an apartment here.’

‘Oh, has he?’

So, they turn round and come back and sit down again.

‘And his big friend, Freddie.’

‘Freddie? Which Freddie’s that?’

‘Señor Foreman.’

‘Oh, that Freddie!’

It was the first time my name came into the frame – over him buying a fucking apartment where I was living! This was a long time after the robbery.

That copper is Fred Cutts. He now works down at the Peacock Gym in Silvertown for Tony and Jacky Bowers, doing a bit of charity work with them. But the tactics of my arrest, in July 1989, were totally illegal. They swept me up as I came out of the Alcazaba to buy a newspaper. I was just walking in my slip-ons to get some groceries and a bit of breakfast. They pounced on me, got me down to Marbella nick; banged me up downstairs. I wanted my lawyer to come down but they never got him for me. They made out he was there so I’d come out of the cell. Instead they got an interpreter down who I’d sold an apartment to.

‘Mr Foreman,’ he said, ‘your lawyer is upstairs.’

Fucking lying bastard! When I went up, I realised it was on top. I was hanging on the stairs, scuffling and struggling. They put the cuffs on me, got me out into the car. I tried to crash the car on the motorway – I knew they were taking me to the airport.

‘If you’re going to deport me, let me go over to Tangiers, not back to Heathrow!’

But they got me there. As they got me out of the car, I ran round to the departure lounge, over the barrier. They recaptured me and brought me back. We went from the top to the bottom of the stairs, getting on the plane. They got the right needle and were punching me in the bollocks, giving me a hard time.

When I was brought back, the judge said, ‘Well, he’s here now.’

But my lawyers filed a motion saying I shouldn’t be standing there because I’d been kidnapped off the street, brought back without a passport. My lawyers in Madrid were never notified. I’d won a case there: I was a residencio, paying two grand a year to be a resident.

The two coppers who came to give evidence against me swore my life away. I supposedly told them that I’d taken part in the robbery and, not only that, but I’d told them Señor Ronnie Knight took part too – that introduced all the evidence from the earlier Knight brothers’ trials.

They came and saw me in Brixton and issued this confiscation order for £7 million plus interest. It’s ridiculous, but they did it on the others as well, though they’d never get anything back. They tracked down 360 grand of mine on a paper trail from different banks; they traced it from Spain way backwards and managed to come up with that figure.

When Horsley was arrested in 1984, written inside the cupboard door with a crayon they found a similar figure – 300 and something grand, which was deducted from where Horsley had been taking the money out. When they arrested me, they brought this fucking door into the court and stuck it in front of me in the box. All the time they were referring to the similarity to the amount of money they’d traced of mine.

This was how they played their hand – they had no evidence on the robbery charge at all, so it was a backup charge of handling the money. It took them months to find the case of a Chinese guy in Hong Kong who’d been charged with handling. That was the precedent; that they didn’t necessarily have to prove the money had come from that particular robbery. Because Hong Kong was under British rule they could use it. My case is now apparently in Archbold News, the legal bible, instead of the Chinaman’s.

They never even proved it was money from Security Express. There was no evidence to say it wasn’t from another robbery, or a drug deal or fraud. I’d also sold the house in Dulwich Village and betting shops to move to Spain; I’d sold a house in America, which I’d had built when I was on my toes there, after Scatty Eddie Watkins shot the customs officer dead during the robbery.

(I’d also left a council flat on the Bonhomie Estate, with Jamie and Gregory living in it – but they’d never paid the rent. I’d left sixty pool-table sites but they were too lazy to get out of bed in the morning to empty moneyboxes. My partner Teddy Dennis had to do it all himself. Fucking hell, I worked hard to get that round together! They blew it up in the air, but that’s kids for you.)

The judge gave me a fucking nine-stretch for Security Express, but the jury were shocked; they gasped.

‘Where’s the beach?’ – ironic, eh? I was in Full Sutton prison for a few years until I got down to Maidstone. I was up at Full Sutton with Eddie Richardson, who was painting a portrait of Lord Longford all the time I was there. I had a visit from a probation officer. I’m only sitting there a few minutes talking when Longford comes over to my table and says to the officer, ‘I want to go home now, can you take me home?’ because he’d given him a lift there.

So, I said to him, ‘Do you mind? We were talking business.’ I was trying to get a bit of parole or a transfer down to London because it took visitors all day long to get there. I coated Longford off and told him to piss off out of it.

I went from Full Sutton to Maidstone, from Maidstone to Spring Hill, from Spring Hill to Latchmere. I did a good six-stretch. I think I was on home leave from Maidstone when I met Frank Kurylo and Ian Atkinson (left and right). I knew Frank from way back when he was a minder at Danny La Rue’s club. He knew more about me than the average person and considered it was a story worth telling. The twins had already done two or three books, and you were getting all the different stories coming out. But of course I was always lurking behind the scenes, popping up here and there.

He knew the SP of it, and the underworld of London knew I was always planning things – and what they didn’t know they suspected. He and Ian gave me ten grand upfront for my 1997 autobiography, Respect. Random House took up the deal and earned well out of it. It was funny – I was on a plane later on, opened this magazine and there were chapters of my book in there.

 

FRANK: Freddie used to come in Danny La Rue’s club; he was a regular. I love Freddie. He was a villain, he was the main man, but I used to be a bit wary of him. I’d heard stories of how he’d done this and done that, and I used to call him ‘Mr Foreman’.

Later, I saw him in Spain when he had to go there for seven years. I had a pal of mine who was there for twenty-odd years, a right good singer who had a couple of clubs there. I used to see Freddie in Lloyd’s nightclub and restaurant, and I’d just nod.

Then I got to know an actress called Helen Keating, who was in London’s Burning, and I met a girl called June, who had a big house next to Fred’s. They both knew him.

Then he got nicked and I got to know him to really talk to when he was in prison. I got a letter from someone who said, ‘You’ve got to get hold of Freddie, he wants to talk to you.’

So, when I gave him my address I said, ‘Do you want to do a book?’

There was this millionaire in Leeds called Ian Atkinson, who told me once, ‘I want to do a book on the Krays – d’you know enough to do a book?’

I said, ‘I’ve been there, I could finance it, but this is Freddie Foreman.’

‘D’you know him?’

So, I said, ‘Yeah.’ I told a lie because I didn’t really know him that well.

Then, a couple of weeks later, he got home leave. We were writing letters to each other, so I met him in the hotel near Marlborough Road station. So, I put it to him: Atkinson wanted to give Freddie fifty grand!

At that time nobody knew much about Fred because he kept everything to himself. Freddie’s an extrovert now, but when he was a villain you couldn’t talk to him. One fella got a glass eye through him – he’d frighten you to death.

We got the publisher Random Century and a fella called John Lisners. Atkinson was going to give another ten grand to Lisners for writing it. ‘But, before this goes any further, before you sign a contract, what’s my whack?’

‘Five grand,’ he said.

‘Bollocks!’ I said. ‘I want twenty grand or you won’t get Fred.’

He promised me twenty grand in four lumps, over a year. Cut a long story short, I’d got cancer by then. I was in bed, about eight and a half stone and no hair. I’d fallen out with Atkinson by this time – he tried to fuck me over the last five grand. He wasn’t coming forward because he thought I was going to die.

Atkinson’s house was shot at. I got arrested as the fella had used my name as he blasted all the windows and doors shouting – ‘This is for Frank Kurylo’

‘’Ow could I ’ave done anything? I’ve got no ’air, I’m sick all the time, I’ve been really poorly for a year!’ I said.

‘Oh, but you organised it!’

Everybody’s ringing up, saying, ‘I’m sorry Frank’s dead.’ Then three years later I had another operation to get some stuff out, and I’m sound. Even the doctor said, ‘Fucking hell, I can’t believe you’re living!’

All of a sudden Atkinson’s dead; all the people who think I’m going to die are dead before me and I’m still here. He died of asbestosis from a big factory he used to work in when he was young. Fifty years later it worked on him and killed him.

There’s story upon story, upon story, but I got really pally with Fred and we’ve been pally ever since.

 

FREDDIE: This was my book launch for Respect, at the Café Royal, London. Roy Shaw (overleaf, right, with Alfie Hutchinson and me) was a great character. You never knew, when you gave him a drink, whether he was going to eat the glass. He used to munch ’em up! It can’t have done him much good in later life, though. He was the original guvnor in the unlicensed boxing game – he beat Lenny McLean the first time around.

At one of those bouts I had a row with the Nashes. I knocked Tilley, their top henchman on the firm, spark out. They were after my brother-in-law, Freddie Puttnam – he had a row with Roy Nash outside the A&R Club. So, they picked that time to sort Freddie out, at the boxing show when Roy was fighting. We’re all mates now, though.

I haven’t known Alfie so long, only since I came home last time in the mid-1990s, after the Security Express stretch. But he’s a lovely little fella – a good friend of Roy’s and an ex-fighter.

 

I’ve known Alex Steene, the boxing promoter, for years. I could have gone backstage to meet Sinatra at the Palladium. I’d just come out of that ten-stretch for Jack the Hat and Alex came running out to my car: ‘Come on, Fred, I’ll take you back!’ But I’d had a drink in the bar with Jimmy Quill (below, with his wife Chris) from The Blind Beggar and Bobby Moore, who Jim was a great friend of – they opened up Morrows, the club in Stratford, together.

Ronnie Kray took a liberty when he shot George Cornell in The Blind Beggar. I said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that to Jim, that’s his front room. The man’s family is upstairs.’ And they were putting bullets through the fucking floor! Ronnie was all sheepish, but I knew Georgie Cornell and he wasn’t a bad fella. I knew his wife too – Olive Hutton, from south London. Ian Barrie fired a shot into the ceiling and Ronnie fired a shot into Cornell’s head. The jukebox jumped and got stuck on the line, ‘The sun ain’t gonna shine any more …’

Bruce Reynolds and me were teenaged mates. His Autobiography of a Thief came out before my Respect. But Bruce was Bruce – he got me looking at another fucking train after that one, down at Woking!

It was years later, after he’d been released. He came out in his army battledress. I’d gone to the Army Stores to get myself a duffle coat and some boots because we had to go into the woods at night to watch the train come into the station.

It came along on a trolley, but there was security all the way along the platform. It was the early hours of the morning – same old thing, but those trains are coming in from all over the country. I knew about them anyway: they were coming into London and running up into King Edward Building. I was going to have them up in town as they unloaded.

But you couldn’t have had it in Woking. I said, ‘Look up in the hills’ – there were car lights flashing on and off, there were police every-fucking-where! They were surrounding the whole area when that train came into that isolated little station. It was deathly quiet, nothing happening, and they came along the platform with an open trolley with all the sacks on it. That was the money going on board – but I knew that, it was happening all over the place.

In 1997, I took some money and a film crew over to Biggsy. I thought I’d lift him over the wall, just as a joke. I only knew him through getting him out of the country, getting his passports for him, getting him down into Belgium and Paris. Then he went on that little journey. I got a message later to say he needed another passport – he went to Brazil on Ronnie King’s.

This documentary was to earn him money because he was skint. Biggsy got five grand for doing a little something. He could live cheaply for fucking months on that; he had a nice little place with a swimming pool.

I always fancied going to Rio and seeing what it was like. This part of Brazil had had the old trams running up the street but they’d all stopped. It was in a state of decay, though it’d seen much better times – the apartments were beautiful, but run down.

Tony Lambrianou (right – seen with Joey Pyle on the left and EastEnders actress Gillian Taylforth) was on me because I got him money for a book (Getting It Straight: Villains Talking) that the late Carol Clerk did with us.

The photographer came over from New York to take the cover photo in pink shirts – we had a load-up with the shirts and ties. We got about thirty grand – big money, but the police objected to us getting paid for it and there was a big scream in the paper.

Every time he was talking about something with Carol, I said, ‘Tony, you got that wrong, that’s not how it happened.’ He wasn’t there – I was there, I know what happened, so let’s get it straight, for fuck’s sake!

It was while I was living in Shoot-Up Hill that she’d come in my kitchen and work on it. We’d have a bottle of wine. She liked a lager, Carol; she could put ’em away – she’d match a man.

During that time Martin Fido came out with The Krays: Unfinished Business – and that book had all the fucking statements that Tony and Chrissie Lambrianou, Ronnie Bender and these two croupiers had made about Jack McVitie’s murder. Tony had sworn that he never – they stayed shtum, him and his brother. They never said anything.

But it came out that they’d made the statements after the trial, but prior to the appeals because Nipper Read and Frank Cater went into Wandsworth late at night. They dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. That fucked us on our appeal, Charlie and me. We would have got out because all the lawyers said there was no evidence at all to substantiate what happened.

 

John Pearson wrote a book on Wilf Pine (overleaf, left, with Charlie’s girlfriend, Diane) called One of the Family: The Englishman and the Mafia, about how he befriended the Pagano family in New York. They used to come over here and drink with me. Wilf worked with Big Albert Chapman; he started off as a tour manager for Black Sabbath.

The week before Charlie Kray (right) died, Wilf said to me, ‘You better get down ’ere, Fred, he’s very ill.’ It’d be the same before Reggie kicked the bucket – Wilf got us down there.

So, I met Wilf and he took me over to Parkhurst prison hospital on the Isle of Wight. Charlie’s leg was like a big fucking balloon, filled with fluid; when he laid his hand on it, there was an indentation. The heart wasn’t strong enough to pump the blood round to the extremities.

During the visit Charlie said, ‘I’m sorry for what the twins did to you, and all the aggro they put you through.’

But I just replied, ‘You’re wrong, Charlie. I did what I did for you, not for the twins. You’re my mate.’ He had tears in his eyes at this point, so we said our goodbyes.

‘The next time you come, bring Jamie down. I’d like to see ’im,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I will. I’ll come down next Wednesday.’

As I got to the door we looked and we both knew it was the last time we’d be seeing each other. I wasn’t surprised when they told me a few days later that he’d died.

Charlie was definitely targeted by the police. I was at a cancer charity show with him at the Mermaid Theatre – there were loads of us there. While I was in the bar there was a little group of guys over by the side. I was introduced to them as ordinary straight businesspeople that Charlie knew. When I looked at one of them there was a moment of recognition. I got the vibe as I shook hands with him; he thought I’d recognised him as a copper. He might even have been involved in one of my cases or arrests because he knew me.

I turned my back and walked away but I looked back and saw their faces: they were undercover coppers, who were setting Charlie up.

So, I said to him, ‘Do you know the strength of these people? I don’t like the look of ’em.’

‘Yeah, they’re all right! They’ve been good to me,’ he said.

But he was so easily swayed.

I knew a guy who was a car dealer, who had the same problem: Lawrence Gibbons, who had a showroom in Brixton. These coppers came down, who had Northern Irish accents – real bullying bastards. I went down to his office and they were all around him. He got a four-stretch but they set him up with this coke; he got out on appeal. He did two years of his sentence before he won, but he should have stayed in the nick: he went out to have a straight fight with a guy at a party and the guy pulled out a fucking tool, stabbed him to death. He’d opened up a nice showroom down Southend way, with all these American cars, then he had an argument at a party and that was it.

Charlie was a poor bastard, though. To give the man twelve years when he was seventy-two was cruel, but what better scenario than for all three Kray brothers to die in prison? If that doesn’t send a message out to the younger generation, what does?

FRANK: When they started doing T-shirts with the Krays’ name on, I earned plenty of money out of that. I sent a lot out to Spain, where a load of English lads were – I used to go across with boxes full of them. All the memorabilia was selling, but Charlie was ripping Ronnie and Reggie off, not giving them the money.

The twins wanted him killed. They got £300,000 for The Krays film – they should have got a million. Charlie fucked the whole deal up! He got £100,000 of that and fucked over Ronnie’s wife, the blonde.

The film rights belonged to Roger Daltrey. Bill Curbishley, Daltrey’s manager, did a deal, but it went sour. Daltrey got his money but Charlie went in as adviser and fucked them for theirs – he claimed expenses, he gave some rights away.

He wanted me to buy some rights to a book.

‘It’d be a waste of time, and, what’s more, I sold ’em!’ I said.

Charlie was a clown – they used to say that about him: ‘Charlie is a Charlie.’ He was thick as two pieces of shit! But Freddie will see a different side to him than what I saw.

 

FREDDIE: I couldn’t go up in the witness box and put Charlie down like they all did – Fraser, Lambrianou – saying he was just some mug: ‘He was nothing, he was rubbish.’ Why call criminals to speak as character witnesses?

‘How can they go up there and do him any good? All they can do is harm,’ I said.

 

There are not many photos of Mickey Regan, apart from the ones of us in bow ties in the sixties. This (below) was taken just before he died a few years ago, with my Jamie. He was a great friend of mine. People I met at the funeral told me Mick said, ‘You were the staunchest man he ever met.’ But I did support him on many occasions.

I’m proud of what my Jamie has achieved, ever since he attended the Italia Conti Academy. I’m so pleased he’s progressed in his acting career. He does stage work and tours up and down the country; he’s done radio plays, which have been very good; he’s done some good film work. They all talk about Layer Cake, and then he was in Elizabeth and several others. Could have done better on EastEnders. He was good on that, but he only signed up for a year’s contract, so they had to kill him off in the script!

 

I’ve known Howard Marks for years; we did a bit of business together. He said he liked it when the criminal fraternity and me got involved in his deals because no one got fucked for their money. They were fucking one another left, right and centre! But, with us, everyone got paid.

He always puffs when he does his little turns on the stage – which are quite good, if you see them. He lights up a spliff and has it on the stage, that’s part of his act. He’ll be with us for many years to come, please god!

 

This was in Tangiers, in 2010. I got arrested when I went over there to see Tom Hardy, who was acting in the film Inception. The Moroccan police nicked me as I was getting off the ferry. They were jumping for joy: it was still on an Interpol notice that I was wanted for a £7 million robbery and there was a fifty-grand reward.

‘That was years ago!’ I protested.

But they hardly spoke English and I couldn’t make myself understood.

My friend was watching through his binoculars. He came down to me with a lawyer. They contacted Interpol and told them I’d already been found guilty of handling money from the Security Express robbery and served a nine-year sentence for it.

Interpol is supposed to be the best police force in the world, but I was clean and it was out of date!

 

Bruce Reynolds and I were chatting away to Eddie Bunker (left), author of a great crime novel called Dog Eat Dog, about prison life and the differences from America; the privileges you have and don’t have; how, out of about three hundred prisoners, you’d associate with only five or six on a daily basis. Ninety per cent are fucking idiots who shouldn’t be in there anyway. You’ve only got a few of your own social standing.

The robbers had the highest standing – not housebreakers, or fucking muggers, or petty criminals. That was against our nature: we only went for the big prizes. Bunker couldn’t stand pickpockets, or conmen, or fraudsters.

This boy, Tony Denham (left), out of south London, has boxed, but he’s an actor as well. He’s been in that comedy Benidorm, had other TV parts and was in the film St George’s Day (2012), with my Jamie. I have him marked down to be one of the firm – Mick or Big George – if a film or TV series is made of my life. I’d like to give him a turn because he came out to Spain when I put on a boxing show, Spain vs London (we won four bouts and the Spanish also won four). I had the Eltham Boxing Club housed in the Alcazaba and they didn’t want to go home. This photo was taken in the Red Pepper restaurant

Christian Simpson (second from left) is my godson. He came over from New Zealand on the eve of his twentieth birthday just as I was being released from the Security Express sentence. He’s staunchly loyal, a really big part of my life, and he’s fought a few battles alongside me with no sign of fear at all. He’s built a great career for himself, working alongside some of the biggest names in the music industry; his protection services are highly respected. He’s since married a beautiful Aussie girl named Stacey. I have all the time in the world for her, and for her parents, my Aussie mates Neal and Bron.

Eddie Avoth (second from right), from Wales, was British and Commonwealth light heavyweight champion. John Brunton (right) had the hotel in Norwich where they did all the security arrangements for Reggie Kray. Bill Curbishley put up the money for him to stay there when he was released from prison. That’s how I got to know John and he’s been a friend ever since.

His daughter had twins of her own, but one of the girls was stillborn. They had to break his little granddaughter’s legs and reset her feet; she was also blind in one eye so they operated on it. That’s a little fighter! A determined little girl, she’s amazing. She’s running around now, just got a slight limp. It was weird: she was in a room on her own and they could hear her having a conversation. It was the twin that died: ‘She’s in the cupboard, I’m talking to her.’ Like Reggie and Ronnie Kray, they used to get the vibes: ‘I’ve got to get a message to Ronnie’; or Reggie: ‘See how he is.’ They had this mental connection. Charlie said, ‘It’s fucking uncanny with these two, they’ll both say the same thing together.’

The same thoughts came into their heads at the same time.

Cliffy Anderson (above, right) was the barman of the Double R club. I nicked him off the Kray twins to work behind the bar of the Prince of Wales, with John Doyland and the other barman. The twins got the hump over that, didn’t like it. I’ve known Cliff most of my life and he also gave evidence for my defence at the Old Bailey. He’s my oldest friend; I’ve known him since the fifties and he still rings me every day to see that I’m ok, or if I need anything. He fought in the Army Boxing Team as a light heavyweight alongside Henry Cooper.

The others in the photo are the actor Frankie Paul Oatway and my godson Christian Simpson – we were invited as VIP guests to York Hall in the East End to watch some top-quality boxing.

 

Derek Rowe (below, centre, with former middleweight boxing champion Alan Minter on the right) was a photographer. When I had the Marshalsea he had the top floor as a photographic studio. He used to photograph radiograms and objects for showrooms but he’d also do modelling. I took loads of girls there for photos of them in dresses and costumes – it was a nice little thing if you wanted to sweeten up a young bird.

I saw him years and years later; he just turned up out of the blue and I hadn’t seen him since the sixties.

He said, ‘I never paid you any rent, Fred, did I?’

But I only charged him a tenner a week because I had the gym underneath and the recording studio. I basically let him have it for nothing because he did me favours. He used to take ringside shots for Boxing News Illustrated and send the photos over to The Ring in America.

He’s a nice guy.

In Australia, my eldest brother Herbie (left – with Wally, who was a para and with the SOE in the war, George and me), who’s dead now, used to go to the Army’s Colonial Soldiers Society, where he got cheap food and beer. He lived in this club for expats; he was treated much better than he was in this country, they really looked after him out there. He was happy by then, but hadn’t always been because he’d lost his little girl when she was twelve years old – she got polio in her lungs. He kept her off school because she wasn’t looking well.

Two nurses were lodging in his house; they got in touch to tell him to come back home and told him that she was dead. He was broken-hearted, and that’s when he took his other kids to Australia.

They never came back.

 

My Danielle (seen here with Jamie and me) has four sons of her own now – including Freddie Junior, who works for Harrods. Danielle, Gregory and Jamie all live over in different parts of Bromley and Beckenham. My Gregory runs the Freelands pub in Bromley.

Janice King and I have been partners for twenty-six years now. We fell in love out in Spain. My and Maureen’s marriage had gone but then I met Janice and it was inevitable that it happened. I still looked after Maureen, even when I came out of the nick. My family have had everything; they’ve had the best. That’s what I did all my time for – providing for them, giving them an education, holidays and homes.

 

That’s Roy Hilder, who’s like another son to me, with his wife Sue, standing next to Janice. He was a boxing trainer and manager, down at the Peacock Gym. He’s a wheeler-dealer; he’s over in Italy, Austria, all round the world and he has a good head for business.

Roy and Sue are my two dearest friends. They met in my pub, The Prince of Wales, for the first time, and that’s where they did their courting. I’m in contact with Roy all the time. He takes time out to come and see me – more than most people who should.

For about five years my Gregory and I had the Punchbowl pub in Farm Street, Mayfair, near the big Catholic church. (That’s Panamanian ex-boxing champion Roberto Duran in the pub overleaf, second from right, and Pandy, far right.) It’s got a lot of history: they used to have a little court at the back, where they’d pass the booze through this little opening. It goes back to the days of Tyburn.

But now it’s changed hands. The filmmaker Guy Ritchie took it over, with a few other people from Prince Harry’s mob. They’ve sold it on to some other people now, but they’ve kept on the same staff that used to work for us. They’ve spent about a million quid on it – you wouldn’t believe it now. It’s a much, much better place than when Ritchie took it over.

There are pictures of him and Madonna out on the pavement with the name ‘Foreman’ over the top. We were trying to keep it all fucking quiet, but he loved the notoriety! I pitched the film Bronson to the two of them because I’d spent time with Charlie Bronson up in Full Sutton, Yorkshire; I got very close to him.

We used to have little drinks on a Friday night on the food boat. We would get the cheese and biscuits out, pork pies and vodka and tonics. I took him under my wing and it was the best time he had in prison. We used to say, ‘Come on, Charlie, your turn to sing!’ because we were having a little drink-up. It was only from six till eight because you’re banged up at eight o’clock. He’d sing ‘What a Wonderful World’ by ‘Satchmo’ (Louis Armstrong) – he’d been in the nick for the past fucking twenty years!

But he kicked off one night – there were a couple of fellows from Wales he had a few words with. They were calling in through the window: ‘LGs’ (London gangsters) they called us. They were giving him some stick and he smashed up the furniture in his cell. In the morning, they opened up the cell door for breakfast and work but, as we all stood out on the wing, Charlie jumped out bollock-naked, covered in boot polish, with a fucking bandana round his head like Rambo, a broom handle sharpened into a spear in one hand and a leg broken off the prison table in the other!

He has to perform to an audience because all the other prisoners are waiting for him to kick off: ‘When’s Charlie gonna start?’; ‘When’s he gonna attack a screw or a prisoner?’; ‘When’s he gonna get up on the roof and throw all the slates off?’

It’s a real shame all of this, because Charlie has a good heart and all he really needs is a break, another chance in life. It’s been far too long, and no man should have to go through what he has. If he could just get out of that hell hole then we could have that pint together that we promised each other.

 

I advised Tom Hardy on his character for Bronson, and that’s the way he played it in the film. He’s made up as a clown: he’s got a normal face and then he turns to the other side with a clown’s face. That’s exactly what I told them and the director made sense of it.

When I saw the vans for the new Krays film, Legend, at Pellicci’s (the Bethnal Green café frequented by the twins since their youth) I went in there and there was Tom. They’d been rehearsing in there. He was dressed up like Ronnie Kray; he introduced me to Scotch Pat and all the different characters there. I never asked who would be playing me, or if I’m in it or not – so I don’t know and I don’t care.

The Krays (1990), with the Kemp brothers, was a complete load of rubbish. Let’s hope the new Krays film is better than the first. I read the script by Brian Helgeland – I’d taken him down The Punchbowl, had a meal with him because he wanted to do a film with me. But he went back to America and, the next thing I know, he’s doing a script on the twins. I suppose he thought that was a better story; fair enough.

But I could see a bit of myself in The Long Good Friday (1980) with Bob Hoskins – by virtue of the fact that I went up the river on the boats, raising money for the boxers at the Olympics. I had the pubs. There were a few deliberate fires at the betting shops because of the opposition from people opening shops on your doorstep.

It was a common way of doing it, so long as no one got hurt.

Then there was the cold store where I worked at the meat market, hanging up sides of beef – where they had the faces all hanging up in the film. There was the Irish connection too – I got nicked out in Ireland and wound up in Mountjoy because the IRA put up a bank out there I was going to rob.

Then there was the casino he had that was burnt down, or bombed. Then I was done up on a robbery with a dye gun by a security guard, and I had it coming out the pores of my skin for fucking months! You put the shower on and there was this fucking dye coming out all the time; it took ages to get rid of. People used to come round and say, ‘Where’s Fred, in the shower?’ because I was in there all the time – which they say in the film.

Someone was really feeding them information about me for the character. All of those things came together. I think it’s the best film they’ve ever done about the gangster life.

 

This is Cliffy Anderson, my godson Christian Simpson and me at Ronnie Biggs’s funeral in January 2014 (below).

‘So much for compassion, heart and soul – forget it. Ronnie Biggs gave himself up at the age of 71. After suffering three strokes, he could hardly speak … [he] had to use a chalk and slate to communicate to his son Michael. What did they do? Put him in a prison hospital? No, they locked him up in Belmarsh top-security prison. It’s bloody disgusting. People complain that the government are soft on crime, but not when it comes to people like myself, or Charlie Kray, or Ronnie Biggs. They’ll always find room for us old boys, while preachers of hate, sex offenders and drunk drivers get off with pathetic sentences.

‘In my life I’ve been sentenced to 23 years’ imprisonment, 16 years of which I’ve spent inside 15 different nicks in the UK and abroad, with much of that time in remand for crimes that ended in acquittal.

‘Just imagine that, if you will. Those missed birthdays, weddings, funerals, your children growing up, relationships beginning and ending. A whole decade came and went, and when I think about what I missed during that time it saddens me.’

Freddie Foreman in The Godfather of British Crime (John Blake, 2007)