Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (23 page)

Frank said, ‘One of the perks of the job, guv, one of the perks of the job.’ His attitude was, ‘Treat me like a human being and I’ll act like a human being.’

I couldn’t have felt less like a human being in that strongbox. On the third morning I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see a screw, or anybody else, again.

Finally they came in, six of them. One had a plastic spoon, one had a plastic knife, one had a plastic fork and one had a dinner on a plastic plate. The plate was scratched and all diseased-looking. God knows what they’d done to the food. Probably they’d gobbed on it; they might have drugged it. I slapped it down on the floor.

The following morning, a doctor came to see me. He said, ‘A lot of good men died in China. Remember that.’ Then he shut the door, and that was the last I saw of him. I still haven’t fathomed what he meant by that.

The same night I was given my charge sheets. I was accused of mutiny, inciting others to mutiny, aiding and abetting escape, attempting to escape from legal custody, gross personal violence to a prison officer (two charges), assaulting a prison Governor, breaking and entering the canteen, stealing property from the canteen, damaging prison property and having an offensive weapon, which was a pole approximately four feet long.

I was in the strongbox for five days before being transferred to a normal punishment cell for two weeks on a nominal charge of assaulting a prison officer. The VC then sentenced me to fifteen months for the string of charges above. I was to serve this time in the Wormwood Scrubs control unit. This was a newly introduced form of imprisonment for cons who were impossible to control within the system. There were only two control units in the country. The other was in Wakefield.

On 23 December 1972, I was taken to the Scrubs with Johnny Crosby. He’d been given six months for attempting to escape, gross personal violence to a prison officer, assault and arson for burning down the gym. All the way there, Johnny kept saying, ‘You don’t half reek.’ I was stinking to high heaven. I hadn’t been allowed a wash for nearly three weeks, my hair was matted and I had a beard starting.

We were taken into reception at Wormwood Scrubs and immediately put into a secure room, a cell with heavy-duty glass, away from all the other inmates. Next, we were brought into the control unit through a little gate which said, ‘No unauthorised movement within this wing.’ I was on one side of the unit and Crosby was on the other. There was no one else there. I’d been looking forward to a shower, but all they would let me have was a jug of water.

Twenty minutes later, eight screws came back and said, ‘Turnover.’ That meant strip.

I said, ‘You wanna play it like this, you’ll see.’

The following morning, Christmas Eve, I had a visit in the cell from Honey, the Governor, a Deputy Governor called Howard Jones, the PO in charge of the wing, two SOs and about ten screws.

One of the screws said, ‘The Governor for Lambrianou.’

I went, ‘Fuck off.’

He said, ‘I’ve heard about you, Lambrianou. Don’t you think you’re coming down here wrecking my prison. Anything you want to say, say it now.’

I said, ‘I’m not gonna wash; I’m not gonna shave, and I’m going to slop out on your clean floor. If you’re going to treat me like an animal, I’ll act like an animal. I’m going to abuse you.’ Crosby, too, was calling him everything.

On Christmas morning, Crosby and I went down to get our breakfast. It was a normal breakfast, but with a difference: on each of our trays there was tobacco, papers and matches.

They must have thought, ‘It’s Christmas, we’ll give them a quarter of tobacco each,’ because smoking in the control unit was forbidden.

I didn’t believe that you should be a Christian one day of the year and not the other 364, and I declined the tobacco. So did Crosby, regretfully. He was dying for a fag.

They put us together in one exercise cage for the morning, as a Christmas privilege. Honey and the PO came to the end of the cage, and Honey called me over. He had two envelopes.

He said, ‘I’ve thought about what you said. I don’t agree with this punishment, but I have to enforce it because it’s in my prison. Here’s an ounce of tobacco each for you. Will you have the Christmas?’ By this, he was asking us to take it in the spirit of seasonal goodwill. We finally accepted it, realising that we had won a moral victory, if nothing else.

The screws felt sorry for us. We didn’t want their sympathy, but we’d often find a half ounce of tobacco left for us, or the odd bar of chocolate which was also forbidden. On Cup Final day, the PO brought in his portable television and put it in such a position we could see it through our flaps.

But for all of these occasional concessions, it was the toughest regime imaginable. You were locked in your cell twenty-three hours a day, and the bed, a hard mattress with a frame, was taken away between seven in the morning and seven at night. You didn’t do labour or meet any other cons. You had a washbasin and a jug. You could have a couple of books from the little library, but nearly all of them were missing pages. That’s all you had.

It was a very lonely life. Even the screws were encouraged not to talk to us. Apart from screws, the only people we saw were those who had to check on us every day – a doctor and any one of the governors.

Over the window was a plastic dome covered with a grille, which
was to prevent the cons above from passing anything down. You could hardly see any daylight. If the windows were open, you could just about hear the outside world. I used to listen to the faint sound of the crowd at Queen’s Park Rangers football ground on a Saturday. I could hear kids outside laughing, and I’d say, ‘People are
enjoying
themselves out there.’ I learned to live by my ears. I used to know when it got late because I could hear that the tubes had stopped running. You weren’t allowed a watch in there.

There were two cages at the back of the unit. I walked in one, Johnny Crosby walked in the other, and that was the only exercise we got. I couldn’t see Johnny, but I could shout over the wall at him.

When we slopped out we were accompanied by six screws, and a PO was always present. We were allowed to the recess room four times a day to do our slops and get our water for bathing, drinking and washing utensils, the plastic knife, fork, spoon and plate. The recess room had a tap, a slopping out bowl, a urinal and a toilet with a little half door so that your legs and head could be seen. There was a shower which you could use once a week.

You lost all privileges except a regulation visit once a month behind glass and one letter a week. I used to sit there with a sheet of paper and an envelope. What could I write? There wasn’t anything to say.

I’d lost all contact with the outside world. I’d forgotten what it was like to be a civilised person. I’d learnt to sleep twenty hours a day. When they took the bed out, I’d lie on the bare floor; my pillow was the towel I washed with, which was changed once a week.

I don’t know how I survived this life. I went down to ten stone in weight – from my usual thirteen and a half, and I suffered badly with constipation. The only time I came out of that wing and was able to stretch my legs was when they took me to the prison hospital for an enema.

As time dragged on I acquired two new neighbours, unusual men
indeed. On my left was a bloke called Ted, otherwise known as the Beast of Jersey. Without any doubt he was mental. He used to run about Jersey in a leather mask, kicking women and raping them. When the coppers got into his house, it was like a black museum with tongs and torture equipment. He was in the control unit for his own protection.

Graham Young, on the other hand, was in the unit for the protection of other prisoners. He had poisoned six of his workmates in a photo lab, killing two of them. He had the brain of a chemist. And believe it or not, this man, the most notorious mass poisoner this country has ever known, was given a little job in the unit – making the screws’ tea!

Because they were on protection, Young and the Beast of Jersey were allowed to get out of their cells a bit. I wasn’t, because I was there for punishment.

The welfare officer, Mrs Pele, protested vigorously to the Home Office about the regime. She said, ‘This mustn’t be allowed to happen.’ She came to see us every day for two months, and she cancelled her holiday to Greece because she didn’t want to leave me and Crosby locked up in that unit.

Honey didn’t like it, either. He turned out to be not a bad man, and he helped me quite a bit. So did the Roman Catholic chaplain, who offered to do what he could for us. However, there was nothing anybody could do at the time. Both control units were eventually closed down, but not before I’d finished my fifteen months.

When I came out, I was transferred to a ‘normal’ Cat. A routine in the Scrubs’ D-wing. I met some interesting characters there like David Bingham, the Portland Spy. He was a strange man, who always referred to the KGB as ‘the guv’nors’. He was a naval lieutenant who had gone over to the Russians, and was sentenced in the early seventies to twenty-one years. Then there was Callan, the notorious Greek Cypriot mercenary. At that time he was serving
seven years. He told me about his ambitions, and invited me to join him in Angola when I was released. I put him down as a nut, but he actually did go out there and do what he said he would. He got an army, and he reputedly massacred hundreds of people. He’s now buried next to my father in New Southgate Cemetery in north London.

One con who went on from the Scrubs to more admirable things was Leslie Grantham. He came to fame as an actor playing Dirty Den in
EastEnders
. When I met him, he was serving life for a murder he had committed in Germany during his army period. He was a quiet fella who was friendly with the pack, but at the same time kept himself to himself. He liked his game of cards like the rest of us, he was never involved in any trouble and he gave the impression that he wanted to finish his sentence the best way he could and get out as early as possible.

He joined the drama group, which got him out of his cell, and I saw him acting in a play in prison. Most inmates are suspicious by nature – ‘He’s only doing it to get parole’ – and I think Leslie Grantham was viewed that way a bit, but he was the one with a difference. He took it more seriously than people thought, and he went on to make a success of it. I send him my best wishes.

While I’d been causing trouble, trying to escape and instigating riots in Gartree, Chris had been having an equally eventful time in Albany prison on the Isle of Wight. The first thing I heard about was a series of violent protests over food and conditions; Chris was heavily involved. In addition to this, he was provoked into various fights over certain cons’ behaviour towards Charlie Kray.

Charlie didn’t want to take any part in the troubles. He knew he shouldn’t have been in prison in the first place, but since he was there he just wanted to finish his sentence peacefully and get out. However, a lot of inmates thought that Charlie wasn’t doing what
he should have been – joining in – and they showed a lot of disrespect, shouting out obscenities while he pushed his barrow about in the yard, picking up the bins and milk churns from around the grounds, which was his job. Charlie took no notice of the heckling; he wanted to be seen as whiter than white. But Chris Lambrianou was seen as blacker than black, and if anybody said the wrong thing about Charlie he would wallop them.

All sorts of conflicts were breaking out within the prison in addition to the demonstrations, and finally the whole thing erupted into riots. The papers started to get hold of it, and they took their coverage to extremes. There were reports that Mafia-style rackets involving gambling and villainy were being operated at Albany, and that Chris and I were behind them. I had never been to Albany prison, so I decided to sue the five newspapers who named me. I asked to see a solicitor, but after taking advice I agreed to accept a printed apology from three of them. The other two refused because of my criminal record. Chris’s part in the Albany disturbances came to an end with the beating up he was given by the screws and his transference, injured, to Parkhurst prison, the incident which gave rise to his feud with Don Barrett.

It was during this early seventies’ period that Chris and I were at our most explosive, although as the years went by we were still refusing to sit down and serve our sentences quietly. You couldn’t have expected men of our age simply to lean back, twiddling our thumbs. But as the end of the decade approached, and I neared the ten-year mark in prison, I dared, for the first time, to look at my future. And what I saw was this: it was time to start helping, not hindering, my chances. 

O
ne day in 1979, Chris and I were sitting having a cup of tea in Maidstone prison with another con called Tony Dunford. Tony had quite a history. He had killed someone with a hammer in Wakefield prison while he was serving time for another murder, and he was given the death sentence. Three days before he was due to drop, he was reprieved. He was also the man who did the negotiating after McVicar’s escape from Durham prison, when a lot of other cons, including Joe Martin and the Richardsons, barricaded themselves in the offices.

Chris, Tony and I happened to be talking about lifers in general, when Tony told us something we had never known in all our years in prison, something which the authorities never made it their business to tell long-term prisoners. He said that a lifer could ask for an involvement in the procedure leading up to his release, and could have face-to-face meetings with representatives of the Home Office.

I hadn’t known that these people were accessible, and I hadn’t realised that a lifer could play any significant part in his own future – help to get things moving towards parole. I’d been under
the impression that everything was automatically decided and done for you.

I’d already come a certain distance through the system. By the time I’d finished my second stretch at Gartree in 1977 and transferred to Maidstone, I’d been taken off the E-list and relieved of the yellow patch on my clothes. I’d also been moved on to Category B. This gave me more freedom of movement within the prison system. There was no signing-in, no identity book, no red light in the cell.

Chris had been at Maidstone for about a month by the time I got there. We’d lost Ronnie Bender and Ian Barrie to other nicks, but Charlie Richardson followed us on. He set up a prison magazine with my brother, and they sent out copies to the House of Commons and the House of Lords as well as people like Lord Longford, and Lady Sainsbury of the famous supermarket family. Lord Longford had a history of campaigning for prisoners’ release, although as a champion for Myra Hindley he came to lose a lot of public support. Lady Sainsbury was another, less controversial, campaigner. Chris became very friendly with Lady Sainsbury at the time, and still is to this day.

My brother now began to mellow in certain ways, and entered into a religious phase. At first I frowned on it and had rows about it with him. It was changing him. I’d never seen any signs of religious inclinations in him in the past. Now other cons were coming up and saying, ‘Is Chris all right? He’s acting strange.’

Looking back, I think it was the only escape Chris had from his sentence. It gave him some peace of mind. But to his credit he genuinely took it up as a belief and it’s still with him. I’ve never personally been one to go to church, although I have my own beliefs. I’m not a good Catholic – far from it – but I’m not a bad one. The religious influence of our mother in childhood was never very far away.

But for all my rows with Chris in Maidstone, he was helping me in other ways. He thought of the future, which not a lot of people do in prison, and he encouraged me to look for people who would support my release, write letters and follow up the things we’d been told by Tony Dunford.

One day I was at my job with the electricians in the works department when a fellow lifer called Johnny said to me, ‘Major James is coming here today. He’s the one who’ll tell you what life holds for you in the future.’ Major James was in charge of P3, the lifers’ division of the Home Office. And I was now aware that prisoners were entitled to see him.

I ran to see Timmsy, the Governor, and I asked, ‘Can I put down to see Major James?’ I ended up third on the list.

I was filthy dirty from the work I’d been doing on the building of a new wing when I walked into the Governor’s office for the meeting. Major James was a little bloke, about five feet eight, a typical civil servant. Staring out of the window away from me, he said, ‘What do you want?’

I replied, ‘What do you mean, what do I want? At least have the courtesy to turn round.’

He said, ‘You and your brother have caused a lot of trouble, and if you’ve come down here looking for laurels you’ll be disappointed.’

‘I know I’m going to do the recommendation,’ I told him.

He said, ‘I can tell you that you are, but it’s up to you whether or not you do over it.’ He added, ‘I’m not prepared to do anything for your brother at the moment, but I’ll decategorize you. I’ll send you up north to Acklington prison, which is four or five miles off Berwick-upon-Tweed, and I want you to give me a year’s good behaviour. Then we can start talking about release. But don’t think you can beat the recommendation.’

After Maidstone, I did not see Chris in captivity again.

I moved to Acklington, a semi-open prison in Northumberland, later that year as a Cat. C inmate. I was no longer considered an escape risk, and I had a lot of freedom of movement within the grounds. There was only one wire fence, no walls, no dog patrols and limited authority around us. The prison itself was an old RAF base where King Hussein of Jordan had trained to be a pilot.

To begin with, the screws didn’t want me there. It was an
easy-going
prison, and they thought I’d be bringing trouble. But over a period of time they accepted me. I kept a lot of peace amongst the men, and they’d come to me for little bits of advice. I was the only Londoner in the place. The other cons were mostly Geordies and Yorkshiremen who kept to their divisions and didn’t much like each other.

I was put to work in the gardens. We had a civilian geezer called Georgie in charge there, and I could never understand a word he said. In Northumberland they’re a cross between a Geordie and a Scotsman, and I had to use one of the screws as an interpreter every time this Georgie spoke to me. He lived a life of poverty, which many people did up there in the north-east. I used to see kids in the visiting room with no shoes on, and other things there that I thought I’d seen the last of. It shook me that this could be happening in 1980.

I sat GCE exams in English and maths and passed them both. I became involved in life again, which undoubtedly helped towards my release. After the course I was given work in the prison canteen, which was a highly trusted job, selling tobacco, sweets and goods to the cons.

So, all in all, I was doing well at Acklington. But then my father fell ill. He was eighty, and he was going in and out of hospital, but he still had his independence and, no matter where we were, he had to see us. If he gave me a visit, Chris would have to have one too. That’s the way he was, same as Violet Kray. He used to come and sit in the visiting room, talking in Greek as usual. Even though I didn’t
speak a word of it I could understand everything he was saying, as I had since I was a boy. One day my brother Jimmy came to see me and he said, ‘The visiting is getting a bit much for him.’ All the brothers wanted to look after the old man. Leon came on a visit and told me he was moving him into his family home at Herne Bay in Kent. Our father did actually go to Herne Bay, but he had to come back home. He missed his house in the East End.

I wrote to a man called David Atkinson at the Home Office, telling him my problems with the old man. He had taken over from Major James as the head of P3, the lifers’ division.

Eventually I received a very nice letter which said, ‘After considering your case we have decided to move you to Featherstone, just outside Wolverhampton, on the grounds of your father’s ill health.’ It was a lot nearer.

Featherstone was one of the most modern prisons in Europe. Each cell had its own toilet, and the facilities were out of this world, but because I was so used to the rough conditions I’d been in for years I found it hard at first to adapt. Also, I was in with
short-termers
, people who were constantly talking about the outside world. I’d always been around people who never even spoke about getting out. Ian Barrie was transferred there later, and Les Long, another old friend, turned up too. The three of us more or less kept ourselves to ourselves.

I looked for the easy option regarding work, and was given a job as a cleaner which keeps you out of the way of the other cons. I grew very bored with it, though, and went on to hotplate duty as a red-band (a prisoner wearing a red band to show that he was entitled to walk about without an escort), serving the food and keeping the dining rooms clean and tidy. To qualify for this job, you had to impress the authorities with your cleanliness, attitude and appearance. They also looked for leadership – the ability to influence without causing problems.

I made a good job of that, but I wanted to work in the open air. Eventually I was given a job with the works department, helping to build this little road around the prison grounds. I was working with a Hell’s Angel called John McDonna, who was serving life for killing someone in his chapter in Brighton. He had very long hair, a beard and a moustache, and he never used to wear anything more than a tee-shirt and trousers, even in the freezing cold. I got on well with him. When we finished the road, one of its bends was named Lambrianou Way and the other one McDonna’s Corner.

I stayed on in the gardens as a dumper driver. One Sunday afternoon, Jim the gardener asked if I wanted to do some overtime. It was a lovely day in April 1982, and our job was to do the football pitch – grassing it, seeding it and turfing it. All of a sudden, the dumper turned over. I thought it was going to fall on top of me, but I managed to dive out of the way and broke my wrist in three places. The medical screw took one look at me and said I had to go to a public hospital. It was the first time I’d been out in the real world for fourteen years.

I don’t think I took in what was happening. I’d always been in a prison van with an armed guard when I was being moved about. Now, there I was in the back of a taxi with an escort of just a PO and one screw. In the hospital there were people running about, nurses flying everywhere. I came to realise that there were still children in this world.

I came out with a plaster on my wrist, and as we drove back to the prison I saw a bit of Wolverhampton. Back at the nick, I was telling Ian and Barrie all about my couple of hours out of prison, about what it felt like to walk in somewhere a free man, without handcuffs. In the end, they were telling me to shut up about it.

I think that was the first sign that my release was not too far away: they trusted me to go out. Nobody but the Home Office had
the authority to let a lifer out of the gates, and it was greatly encouraging that some unknown person there had said yes to me.

My wrist began to get better, and five or six weeks later I was on light labour, just sweeping down landings and mopping out rooms. One Sunday afternoon after four o’clock, I was sitting watching a game of football on television when a PO came in and said to me, ‘Can I see you in the office?’

He said, ‘You’ve just had a phone call. Your father is very ill, and if you’d like to get yourself ready, we’ll take you to see him tonight.’

I knew he had a hernia; I didn’t know he had cancer until that day. Within an hour I was down in reception; and they lent me a jacket. We left Featherstone at 5.30 and travelled to St Leonard’s Hospital in Hoxton in a taxi – me, a PO and a screw called Ted.

Suddenly, after all those years, I found myself back in the East End, standing outside the hospital. Chris hadn’t been allowed out because the authorities felt he would play up. I went inside, and saw my Jimmy, Leon and his wife June, my son and daughter and a couple of neighbours. I was allowed two hours with the old man. I had a chat to him, and he knew I was there, but I think he was too ill to really comprehend it. He was on morphine. One thing you never forget is that smell.

For the second time I was in freedom with no handcuffs on, and I was allowed to have a chat with my brothers before leaving for Featherstone at 9.30 in the evening. But by the time I left, I knew it wasn’t going to be long with my Dad.

The following week, on 28 June, he fell so dangerously ill that he wasn’t expected to see the night through. They decided to take me to see him again that day. This time, they knew it was bad. They arranged to get Chris down there in the afternoon and me in the evening. The hospital was told, ‘Any further problems, get in touch with the prison.’

Everything was happening so fast. I could see my freedom on the horizon because I was being tested, admittedly in a compassionate way, by the authorities through these hospital visits. But I was gutted about my father.

When I got to the hospital the whole family was there – my brothers, their wives and kids. They had a room at their disposal. I was told that what I was going to see was not a pretty sight. I walked into the wards, and I could see that my father had lost a lot of weight. He must have weighed no more than four and a half stone. I was told he’d been asking for me: ‘I wanna see Tonys’ – a Greek way of saying Tony.

I grabbed hold of him, and I saw that his eyes had gone. I wanted to say, ‘Listen, give him an injection, end it.’

We all went into the side room, and the screws stayed away. They were genuinely trying to be considerate. I walked out of the hospital with Jimmy, and I stood in Kingsland Road on my own. I didn’t know what to do. I could have walked away, but I went upstairs, back to the ward.

My Dad said, ‘Lillie,’ his pet name for my mother, and then he died.

We went back into the side room. Nobody had anything to say. I went back and kissed my Dad, and we left.

I felt numb, and for the next couple of days I spent a lot of time in the prison chapel, sitting on my own. I was totally lost. It’s bad enough when one parent dies, but when two have gone, you’re on your own. And you feel it even more when you’re in prison. I kept asking, ‘Why him? Why them? Why me?’

I blamed myself: ‘If I hadn’t had this sentence, I would’ve spent more time with him.’ I felt that we let him down, because we should have been there towards the end of his life. From the day we went into prison, the old man used to say, ‘I’m not going to die until my sons are out.’ In our hearts we knew that he might not survive our
sentence, but at least he did see us again in freedom, albeit a very limited freedom.