Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (21 page)

Chris asked, ‘Who?’

‘Ginger Dennis,’ he said.

Ginger Dennis was a known villain and a friend of Freddie Foreman, but he had done nothing wrong.

Once Humphries said that, of course, Chris was going to do him. Jimmy Humphries had no friends, so he paid another con called Chester Barnes to be his minder. Chris attacked them both in the dinner queue one day. He picked up the food and let them have it. They got whacked up in the air a bit, and after that Humphries decided he needed Rule 43 protection in the block – isolation from other prisoners.

In order to get it he went to the Governor, Peter Timms, with his ally Chester Barnes, claiming he wanted to grass up Chris and me. This was enough to guarantee protection from us. He made a statement alleging that we were involved in drugs, gambling and all kinds of rackets. I won’t deny that I was a bookmaker at Maidstone – I’d done a bit of that throughout my prison career. The currency for gambling was half-ounce packets of tobacco, and the odds on a horse, or whatever, were the same as outside. I had access to a lot of tobacco – I won it in card games and so on – and when I had more than my official limit of two ounces, I’d get other cons to carry it for me.

The rest of Humphries’ accusations were false. Chester Barnes, it turned out, had been promised a few quid by Humphries for conspiring in the allegations against us, but after the meeting with Timmsy he immediately realised what could happen to him for being a grass – and, worse, for being a lying grass. He went to Chris, told him what had happened and said he would tell the Governor it was all a get-up. I went to see Timms myself. He said, ‘Look, I know it’s a pack of lies. I don’t even want to read it,’ and as good as threw it in the bin.

It was too late by now for us to do anything about it. Humphries and Barnes had gone straight on to protection, and Chris was being sent back to Albany, a tougher prison, for a twelve-month quietening-down period. The authorities felt he was getting out of control after the scene in the dinner queue, the incident with the six-inch nail and various other clashes. But no one had the bottle to tell Chris he was moving back to Albany.

Timms approached me the previous evening and asked, ‘Would you be prepared to tell Chris?’

So I went and shouted through the door to my brother, ‘You’d better get your kit packed, you’re on the way tomorrow.’

He yelled back, ‘Yeah, and you can fuck off as well.’

The screws and the Governor all jumped back from the door. ‘He says, “I ain’t going,” I told them. I had to talk to Chris all night long before he would allow them to take him to Albany. They didn’t know how to handle him.

Sex offenders, obviously, were the people who would incite the most hostility within any prison, but because they were kept in isolation, under Rule 43 protection, little violence ever occurred. Chris, however, is proud to be the only man who has been able to get at Ian Brady, the hated Moors Murderer.

This happened during the summer of 1969, while we were in Durham – Chris, Ronnie Bender, Ian Barrie and I. Because we were maximum-security prisoners, we were in an isolation wing with four of the most notorious sex offenders this country has ever seen: Brady, the Cannock Chase Killer, the Gravel Pit Killer and John Straffen, the longest-serving prisoner in Britain. The PO on the wing explained the position. He said, ‘We have in the unit people you ain’t gonna like, but you can rest assured you’ll never get near them.’ They were segregated from us almost as effectively as they were from the general prison population, and they exercised on their own.

Although the other three of these prisoners frequently fought and argued amongst themselves, I never saw Brady speak to anybody other than a screw. He was constantly surrounded by about ten prison officers, and he looked like a thoroughly evil bastard. He never, ever smiled. To hang him would be a crime against the children he murdered, and the families of those children. I sincerely hope that he lives to be a hundred and serves and suffers every day of that. We saw him living the life of a recluse, shunned by everybody. He was treated like trash; the screws who had to deal with him held him in contempt. My Chris happened to be on the stairs one day when Brady went past with his entourage of screws. Suddenly Chris saw an opening, and he whacked him.

As a sequel to this story, I was in the same prison as Brady three years later when I was being held in the control unit at Wormwood Scrubs. He sent a message to me, asking how my brother was. My reaction is unprintable.

Peter Morris, the Cannock Chase Killer, who’d murdered a little girl, looked like the sort of person who’d done it with pleasure. He was an arrogant character. When he was being escorted around by screws, going to exercise or being taken down for food, he’d shout out something like ‘Hello, boys’, trying to talk to us. We spat on him.

Burgess, the Gravel Pit Killer, had murdered two little girls. He was an inadequate, a pervert. Straffen, on the other hand, was mentally disabled. He had the mind of a child of four, and for that reason was accepted by us. A tragic case, he was sentenced to death for the murder of a child in Bristol, but was found to be insane and reprieved to life imprisonment. He escaped from either Broadmoor or Rampton maximum-security hospitals, and was alleged to have murdered another little kiddie. He was again sentenced to hang, but again reprieved because of his insanity.

He used to peel the stamps off envelopes for the
Blue Peter
appeal,
and he was the first man ever to be allowed a television in his cell, early in the sixties. It was donated by Lord Cadbury, a member of the famous chocolate family, as a gift of compassion. From that day on, Straffen would buy nine bars of Cadbury’s chocolate at a time from the prison canteen. He used to put them at his cell window where the sun would melt them, and he’d come down to us crying, with the chocolate melting all over his fingers.

He was allowed to come down and make our tea and generally talk to the boys. I saw a picture of him recently. His head looks like a space dome now, after all the beatings he’s taken over the years from cons who have had access to him. The most humane thing that could be done for Straffen would be for someone to say, ‘Here’s a pill – swallow it if you want to end it one day.’ Tragic as he is, he’s not safe ever to release.

I have probably seen more violence in prison over homosexual quarrels than anything else. You might get one man trying to pinch another one’s boyfriend, or a couple being split up by prison transfers. Events like these have led to rape and murder within prisons while I’ve been there.

Having lived in prison as long as I did, I can understand the homosexual attitude. It’s not a thing I ever got involved in, but most of the men who did seek it out were not, by nature, homosexuals. They were known in the system as ‘prison poufs’, and they accounted for maybe 10 per cent of the population in the nick. They were men who were heterosexual in freedom but inside, because of sexual deprivation, would turn to homosexuality. You’d see them sitting with the wife and kids in the visiting room. They’d kiss the missus and then go back to bed with the boyfriend. They tended to stay amongst themselves, although some of the men who were doing it on the sly – not wanting the stigma or the derisive comments of other cons – would discreetly keep away
from homosexual company in day-to-day association and never talk to anyone about what they were doing at nights and in the shower room.

When you’ve got a number of men thrown together like that, then obviously it’s going to happen, especially where you’ve got young guys of twenty or so coming in at the peak of their sexual endeavours. It’s not within the prison rules, it’s not something the authorities encourage, but there’s not a lot anyone can do about it. In my experience most of the screws just turned a blind eye, and the attitude of a lot of them towards new arrivals seemed to be, ‘Find yourself a boyfriend, settle down and do your best.’ If a screw goes to a cell door and finds someone in bed with another con, what does he do? Normally, he’d know what was going on and stay out of the way until one of the couple appeared.

It was a very touchy subject in prison, treated with either great embarrassment or jokes. At the same time, it was capable of causing tremendous trouble. Some of the inmates were out-and-out gay, so you’d come across quite a bit of poaching. They’d be after the younger boys. There would be stabbings and all sorts of violent incidents over this kind of thing. I have known the authorities try to break up a relationship by transferring one of the blokes to another prison. Then, in the interests of a peaceful life, they’d have to reunite the pair they’d just separated.

A Yorkshireman known as the Bull took a liking to a young gay boy in Parkhurst while I was there in 1974. They fell out, and the young fella went off with another bloke. The Bull kidnapped his former boyfriend, barricaded himself and the young lad inside his cell and refused to let anybody in or out for three days.

Another rape case took place in Maidstone prison, which was also the scene of a sexually-motivated murder. A man called Kessler was there during our time, serving life imprisonment. He was about six feet tall and wore dark glasses. He always tried to give the
impression he was one of the boys, but he delved into the murky side of life with younger, practising homosexuals. Eventually he came clean about it and said to me one day, ‘They’ve moved my mate.’ His boyfriend had been transferred to a nut-house. He wanted to get himself sent off to the same nut-house to be with his bloke, and in order to achieve this he decided to kill a fellow-con. He befriended another guy on the wing, started sharing a cell with him and one day, after asking the chap to make him a cup of coffee, battered him to death with a bed leg wrapped up in a towel. I was unaware of this when I passed the prison hospital and saw Kessler there.

I said, ‘What are you doing here?’

He replied, ‘Oh, I don’t feel well.’

No wonder he didn’t feel well: he’d just killed someone stone dead and it was still his secret.

In the hospital they gave him some Panadol, and later on he decided to go back. Then the screw saw the bloodstains round his cuffs, and Kessler confessed: ‘I’ve just killed my cellmate.’

All hell broke loose. He was charged and sentenced to life imprisonment to run concurrent. And he never did get the transfer to be with his boyfriend.

F
rom the moment I got my sentence, the thought of escaping was never far from my mind. I was involved in three break-out attempts, all during 1972 at Gartree prison. I tried to go over it, under it and through it, but I never succeeded. I was at a stage where I couldn’t see the end of my sentence, I didn’t care what I did and, like every other long-timer, I was looking for opportunities. There was a certain challenge about the idea of escaping. It was all about beating security. It was exciting, too. You could always tell who was buzzing and who wasn’t, and every escape bid caused a lot of rumblings within the prison. Nearly all of the plans were doomed to failure from the beginning, especially at Gartree, which was the toughest nut to crack in Britain. But it was always worth a try. It was better than sitting there doing nothing. If you do nothing, nothing happens. I never wanted to get sucked into my sentence, never wanted to settle into the humdrum routine of prison life.

By the time I arrived at Gartree in November 1970, I had been taken out of the maximum-security blocks and moved into what was called the dispersal system. This operated in certain
high-security
prisons, and allowed association between Cat. A and Cat. B
cons – prisoners who were regarded as less dangerous than the
A-men
, although still a potential threat to society, should they ever escape. Their movement within the prison was less restricted, and they were granted more privileges. The idea was that if you put two or three bad apples in the barrel, some good might come out of them. The reality was probably a bit different: those two or three bad apples would rot the rest. Naturally, I was classified as a bad apple.

As an A-man in the dispersal system, I found conditions only slightly easier than they had been in the security blocks. The only improvements were that we had access to other cons, we had a few more privileges and there was not such a huge prison officer presence around us – although it was big enough. I was still being signed over from one part of prison to another, still having cell searches every day, still being checked day and night, still being filmed by security cameras everywhere I went.

A typical day would begin at seven o’clock when the cell was unlocked, and I’d wake up and turn on Radio 2. You were allowed to have quite a few things in your cell – carpet, curtains, bedspreads, towels, a record player, a two-band radio and PT stuff. You could also have small pets, within reason, if you wanted them. I personally didn’t have a lot of clutter in my cell – and any photographs I had I’d never put on display. Most cons were the same. If someone got the hump, they’d immediately go and do your photos.

I used to wander down past a gauntlet of screws to collect my breakfast at about 7.30.

Porridge – a very low-grade porridge – would be left out for you to help yourself. Some prisons would provide milk too, but it wasn’t usual. You didn’t get sugar. There would also be a bit of bacon, or a serving of goulash, a famous prison meal which was a savoury mixture of ingredients such as bacon or beef, potato and
cabbage, and a mug of tea with no sugar. The tea was made from what looked like tea-leaf dust, and a screw would come along with a scoop and go
whack
into each cup with cheap powdered milk. It was terrible stuff, that tea; if you were to fill your car up with it, it would take off. We used to buy tea bags and tins of Marvel from the canteen and make our own.

The A-men were locked up again to eat breakfast in the cell, and taken out to the workshops at around a quarter to nine – always with an escort and a dog-handler, and separately from the Cat. B cons. We were only ever allowed to work in supervised shops, never in the grounds. We had our statutory one hour’s exercise every day.

We’d have a cup of tea when we got to the shop, and another pot after about an hour’s work. Life in prison revolved around cups of tea, and a lot of the cons drank gallons and gallons of the stuff. I had two flasks for keeping boiling water in, and before I went to bed I’d make sure they were full up.

At around half past eleven we’d be handed back to the escort and taken out of the shop before the Cat. B boys. We’d collect our lunch and return to our cells, where we were locked in while the rest of the men were served. Lunch was the main meal of the day. There was always soup and a bread roll, a hot meal and a sweet, usually a floating duff – a pudding with about two currants in it, in custard made mostly with water. All three courses would be in separate compartments of a metal tray, and you were lucky if you got it back to your cell without the custard running into the main course. On Sundays, we’d get a ‘roast dinner’ with four or five potatoes which were like chips. They were small potatoes, cut in half and fried.

In the nick, we were served what were supposed to be proper meals, all worked out by Home Office dieticians. They reckoned the menus offered a perfectly healthy diet. Basically, there was nothing wrong with the food; the problem was what they did to it. Most of it was prepared the day before or overnight, so it was left lying
about. Nearly everything was steamed. The cabbage was always very watery, with none of the goodness left. Even the meat was steamed, and then given a little grilling. You got one slice, although you could have as much bread as you wanted. The potatoes were full of eyes. The men in the kitchen couldn’t do anything about this because they didn’t have time: they were under orders to rush the food out. A lot of cons used to mash up their dinners as a way of disguising the rubbish, hiding what they didn’t want to know.

Inevitably, we found ways to liven up our food. In the canteen we could buy almost anything we wanted with our prison wages of around £1.50 a week, our working pay – but not with private cash. We’d save up our canteen money and buy ingredients to make the food more tasty. In long-term prisons we had cooking facilities in a little kitchen on the wing, so if we had chicken for Sunday dinner we’d save the legs and make our own stew out of them later, or curry them up.

Also, there were a lot of fiddles going on, with tins and parcels of food coming out of the kitchen, and the authorities knew it. At one time we could buy vitamin pills to supplement our diet, but they were eventually banned because certain cons were living on them.

The lunch hour was the most focused part of the day. The newspapers and the mail would be dished out, and the B-men, who weren’t locked in cells, would hear the gossip about other cons. We’d be told all about it after lunch when we were checked back into the shop. We’d have a chat with the boys and another cup of tea, do a bit of work here and there, and knock off again about half past four to go back to the wing for tea. This would be a light meal – maybe something like baked beans or a salad with bread and butter and another mug of rocket fuel. We’d eat it in our cells while we were locked up between five and six o’clock.

Then we’d be let out for association. This was the most crime-free part of the day, because most of the cons would sit and watch
television. They’d stare at anything, without moving. From the authorities’ point of view, television was the greatest thing they could ever put in a prison. In my circles we watched documentaries and became very interested in politics, especially law and order issues. We used to sit and slag off all the politicians talking on television, especially Maggie Thatcher. Right the way through the six o’clock news we used to moan about the things that were going on – anything from the latest government decisions to the world’s disasters and tragedies. We were also keen on nature programmes because they were about life, an escape from the twilight zone we lived in; and we’d all be there for any big football or boxing matches.

Those things apart, the television never interested me. I could not stand the soaps. If you watched those, you were classed as one of the prison sheep. There was only one thing that could drag them away from
Coronation Street
and that was the bell for the ‘liquid cosh’. Medical treatment would be given out at about ten to eight, and if you didn’t get there within fifteen minutes you were too late. There would be a cavalry charge when the bell went. Everyone wanted to get there first for their nightcap.

The cons were on all sorts of pills, and you could get any authorised drug you wanted. The authorities held quite a bit of control this way: when the men were sedated, there would be less chance of violence. I was on Mogadon for a long time. And if you had a headache, you were given Valium: ‘That’ll do you good.’ Is it any wonder that men come out of prison wanting whatever uppers and downers they can get?

Medical care in prisons was in my opinion generally very bad. Cons who reported sick were given pretty dismal treatment. Everybody tried to skive, but if you had a genuine complaint you were still treated with a great lack of interest by the doctors. I don’t think they could handle the numbers. Even after an operation, the follow-up treatment and the food you were given were absolutely
disgusting. And you would usually be dismissed from a proper medical with one word: ‘Out!’

At nine o’clock, tablets taken, we were banged up in our cells until the next morning. Then it would start all over again.

Several years into my life sentence I realised that time had stopped meaning anything; the outside world seemed far away, unreal, despite what we watched on television. It gave us a very false picture anyway.

We tried to lead a bit of a civilian life. I had the moustache and the long hair in the seventies, and a lot of the boys used to wear
bell-bottom
jeans. We tried to keep up with the trends, but it was very difficult. As far as women were concerned, I personally forgot all about that side of life.

Visits became more and more of a strain. I never understood what my visitors were telling me about their problems outside; I couldn’t imagine myself in their position. Instead of looking forward to visits, I started to dread them. On a good morning or afternoon they could make you feel very high, but most of the time I came away with terrible headaches and I’d be down for two or three days afterwards.

I lost interest in letters as well. None of the people who wrote to me told me anything I could relate to, and for my part I had nothing interesting to say in any of my replies. I was living in a completely different world. Our wages, for example, were out of touch with anything approaching reality, and the things we could buy, and chose to buy, from the canteen would have caused no great excitement outside. Who else but us would want to celebrate the news that we were going to be allowed to buy our own toiletries instead of having to use prison soap?

Cleanliness is a number one priority among cons in long-term prisons, and Gartree was spotlessly clean. So were its inmates. That
was one thing all lifers had in common: you always left the washbasin and the shower clean, and you always had to have access to water. We were continually washing.

The majority of cons had a lot in common, especially the fact that we all hated the system, and for most of the time we coexisted in an atmosphere of uneasy peace. Everybody used to watch everybody else, we all paid attention to the prison grapevine – which was better than a newspaper – and we all knew each other in a roundabout way. But they were not necessarily the people you’d choose to have living next door in an ideal world, and the peace could give way to explosions within seconds.

Much of this was to do with the pressures and limitations of prison life; and brothers were not exempt. Chris and I had bust-ups in every prison we were in together. The other cons used to think we were killing each other in the cell, but they knew better than to interfere. It was a release. There came times when we were sick of the sight of each other; we’d have a massive argument over something trivial, and afterwards we wouldn’t speak for months. But even during these periods Chris would be there for me if there was trouble. No one could have had a better ally.

Quite a few of my arguments with Chris were over his tendency to trust people before he knew for a fact they were trustworthy. He’d say, ‘So and so’s a nice fella,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, but …’ And we’d have a blazing row. I was more selective: I tended to stick closely to my own circle of friends, and I spent most of my leisure time chatting with them over a cup of tea or having a game of cards. From time to time we’d have a game of snooker, or go to the gym and lift a few weights. Fitness and sports were greatly encouraged in prison, and the educational facilities were good, although A-men were not allowed to take courses unless the security was watertight, because civilian tutors were involved and the authorities were always worried about the prospect of hostage-taking.

Many inmates couldn’t read or write, but at the same time I knew men who came out with Open University honours degrees. There were a lot of talented people in prison – cons who were skilled in carpentry, crafts, music and art – and it made me wonder half the time what they were doing in there.

However, it must be said that the dispersal prisons were more than anything else schools and universities of crime, and as such they gave an education second to none. There were young fellas in there learning their trade by association with professionals and making contacts for the future. The professionals, amongst themselves, would put their criminal brains together to plan in every detail the jobs they would do when they came out. Occasionally they would put their brains together for some more immediately rewarding projects.

When I first went to Gartree, there was a spate of
hooch-brewing
going on at the time. It was punch made out of fruit and a bit of yeast, and it always seemed to turn out green. It tasted like garbage and we used to call it Gut Rot. Some of the cons were experts and we knew we could rely on them for a good brew, but most of us had a go ourselves. We’d nick a bit of yeast out of the kitchen, along with potatoes or dried fruit, and buy a kilo of sugar and tinned fruit from the prison canteen. We’d get tepid water, and we’d brew the mixture in a plastic bucket. The secret was the amount of sugar you put in it. After about twenty-four hours, the smell of it would be all over the nick. We used to get that Deep Heat cream for muscle strains and rub it everywhere to try and hide the smell of the hooch. And we’d use a decoy. We’d make three buckets and we’d let them find one. The other two would be stashed.