Wannabe in My Gang? Read online

  Every other week we had to attend the Magistrates’ Court to answer our bail, apply to alter our bail conditions, enter a plea and finally attend to be told the matter was being sent to Crown Court for trial. During that long process, we had to take days off work, travel in the early hours of the morning to arrive on time from London and sit in the court waiting-room for the best part of a day whilst waiting for a meaningless five-minute hearing. Paul said he wasn’t going to be fucked about and pleaded guilty. Michael and I rowed with him outside the court, saying his guilty plea would ruin our chances of getting a not-guilty verdict. In his usual devil-may-care manner, he laughed and said, ‘Don’t worry about your plea, because I won’t be turning up for their silly fucking trial unless I’m in handcuffs.’

  Paul has never had any respect or concern for the law and those that administer it. As a teenager he was sentenced to six months to two years borstal training. In those days they used to offer the inmates incentives in order to curb their unruly behaviour. If you kept out of trouble you were allowed to wear a blue tie and blue tie wearers were given privileges, such as additional visits. The inmate would then progress through various coloured ties, earning more privileges and eventually freedom. Paul told them from day one they could keep their ties, keep their visits and keep their privileges. Nothing would ever make him change his mind. Eventually, two years and three weeks after being sentenced, he was booted out of the borstal.

  After months of being messed about, my brother Michael and I were informed that our trial would take place at Stafford Crown Court. A trial that is scheduled to last two weeks or perhaps even a month may only last a day if the defendant changes his or her plea at the last minute. Because of this, the courts are unable to give the defence a precise date for a trial to begin and so a preliminary date is given and the defendant is put on notice. This means that a couple of weeks before the preliminary date you are told to contact your solicitor every evening to learn if you are in court the following day.

  During the time that Michael and I were on notice, we found ourselves working in Newcastle. With at least a day’s warning, we could not foresee a problem in returning to the Midlands to arrive at court on time. We rang our solicitor at 5 p.m. and asked if there was any news. He told us that we had been summoned to appear at court the very next morning. I was driving a heavy-goods vehicle and explained to my solicitor that it was doubtful I would be able to make it to Stafford in time as I was only permitted to drive a certain amount of hours, by law, without having a substantial break. His advice was that I should not break the law, but present myself at the court at the earliest opportunity. The next morning, Michael and I set off for Stafford having taken the statutory driving break. We rang the court at regular intervals to inform them we were on our way and that we would arrive around 10 a.m., the time we had been ordered to be there.

  We finally arrived around 10.45 a.m. but were told that the case had been adjourned and a warrant for our arrest had been issued. The official said that we hadn’t turned up as ordered and therefore we had no defence to the breach of bail. We were once more bailed and told to reappear at the court in 14 days. It was an absolute waste of everybody’s time, but much of what happens during the legal process is.

  Two weeks later, Michael and I stood trial for the assault on Stuart Darley. We told the court an embroidered version of the truth: Darley was drunk, behaving like a lout, had thrown things and when I approached him had raised his hand; I was in fear for my safety so I had struck him in self-defence. It was feasible, simple and straightforward. We felt the jury wouldn’t have to spend too much time deliberating over it.

  When Darley went into the witness box to give evidence he was brash and brazen. He answered back to our barrister and the jury could see what sort of man he was. Although I was technically guilty in law, I think he deserved what he got and the jury agreed with me. We were found ‘not guilty’. Michael and I were ecstatic as we had been expecting to receive custodial sentences. Looking over at the police, we could see that they were not enjoying the moment as much as we were. Soon, it was their time to smile. The judge released the jury and ordered Michael and me to remain in the dock. He told us that as we had committed an offence concerning our bail, he was going to fine us £50 each. I estimated that my travel costs and loss of earnings in relation to the numerous court appearances I had been forced to make were no less than £500. The court owed me £500, I owed them £50, and so if they sent me £450 we would all be happy. It was the easiest solution I could think of, but I knew nothing concerning the law could be resolved logically. I was told that if I had not paid within the 28 days they had given me to pay, then another warrant would be issued for my arrest. To be honest, as long as they owed me money, I couldn’t give a fuck what they issued.

  After the Darley trial, Ronnie Kray asked me to visit him to see how things had gone there and were going in general. I travelled to Broadmoor and after discussing events at the trial, Ron told me he was rather concerned about new rules that had been brought in at Broadmoor. Ronnie used to chain-smoke and was being told that if he wished to smoke he would have to do so in a designated smoking room. Ronnie said, ‘I spend most of my time now sitting in there surrounded by fucking nutters!’

  I laughed and reminded him that he himself was a nutter according to the authorities. Ronnie thought this was funny, in fact he roared his head off over it. ‘Bernie,’ he said, ‘would you do me a favour and write to the Environmental Health Department at Bracknell Council and tell them that the conditions here are very bad for the patients?

  ‘Tell them I am forced to sit in a room full of “fucking nutters” and that it’s such a small room, filled with so much smoke, I can barely see my hand in front of my face. Tell them you think it is detrimental to my health. If they ask you how you know this, tell them you were talking to a hospital warder in the pub in the village and the officer was concerned about the effect these changes were having on the patients.’

  Ronnie thought that if an outside agency became involved then the Broadmoor authorities might do something about it, especially if they thought that their own staff were not happy about the situation. I wrote the letter for Ron using a pseudonym and posted it, as agreed, to the Environmental Health Department. Within two weeks I received a reply, informing me that the Council were unable to take the matter further as they had no powers of enforcement in hospitals as they come under the Health and Safety Executive. They did promise, however, to pass my letter on to the relevant department at Broadmoor. It was the last thing Ron and I wanted; we both knew it could cause problems for him if either of us were linked to the letter by the bosses at Broadmoor. I rang Bracknell Council and asked them to forget about the complaint, but they informed me the letter had already been passed on. Less than a week later, a letter from Broadmoor dropped through my letterbox.

  I am writing to acknowledge receipt of your letter, the contents of which concern me not so much from the point of view of whether or not restricted practices occur, but that members of staff appear to be discussing matters affecting hospital policy in a public house with yourself and possibly others.

  You will appreciate that this is in breach of contract and I therefore must ask you to let me have the names of those members of staff, together with details of alleged restricted practices that you are suggesting occur on the Henley ward.

  With regard to the specific point on the smoking policy, this ban is an internal policy matter, which will be dealt with internally.

  I look forward to hearing from you with the information requested in this letter.

  I was gutted. I knew that Ron had opened a can of worms because of the story he had made up. Hospital warders allegedly discussing internal matters with members of the public in a pub was bound to cause a stink. I knew that on the next visit to Ron, we would have to discuss how we were going to respond to any problems it may cause.

  About four days later, I visited Ron and explained to him about the letter, but he
told me to just forget it. I emphasised the fact that it could cause problems for him, but he just said, ‘Fuck them, what are they going to do, lock me up?’ When the visit ended, I said my usual farewells to Ron, but had no idea it was to be our last meeting. I shook his hand, walked out of the visiting-room, across the exercise yard and into the main reception area.

  As I went to leave, a man approached me and asked me if I was Bernard O’Mahoney. ‘Yes, I am,’ I replied.

  ‘Would you mind coming into the office?’ he asked.

  ‘No problem,’ I said. I thought that they were going to search me for smuggling letters or money out for Ron. I hadn’t anything on me and so I wasn’t concerned.

  The man introduced himself as the general manager of Broadmoor. He told me that I had written a letter to Bracknell Council claiming that I had been discussing internal policy with members of staff in a public house and he wanted to know their names as they were in breach of contract.

  I told him that I didn’t know what he was talking about. He produced a copy of a letter I had sent to Ronnie and then showed me the letter I had sent to the council. The handwriting in the letters was identical.

  ‘You are Bernard O’Mahoney, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you have sent this letter and you are alleging that members of staff have been discussing internal matters concerning this hospital in a public house. I want to know who they are.’

  ‘I’m not prepared to tell you,’ I said. I was then asked to leave.

  The following week I returned to Broadmoor and told the receptionist that I was there to visit Ronnie Kray. When I said that my name was O’Mahoney, there was a brief delay while the man looked through a file; he then said that my visits with Ronald Kray had been terminated forthwith. The hospital, he said, would not permit me to visit him any more. I was banned from Broadmoor Hospital, home of some of Britain’s most infamous murderers, rapists and arsonists. I don’t know if anybody has ever been banned from Broadmoor before, I’m sure they have, but I thought it was quite amusing.

  I must admit, I missed my visits with Ron, who was unintentionally funny and so appealed to my sense of humour. I certainly met a lot of interesting characters through him. One I had become particularly friendly with was a Scot named John Masterson.

  John, a former miner from Hamilton in the west of Scotland, had spent much of his adult life in prison, mainly for robberies and burglaries. In prison he had become a friend of the Krays and they had presented him with a pocket watch inscribed: ‘To John from the Kray brothers’.

  John was really proud of the watch and was always showing it to people. He had organised lots of petitions for the Krays’ release and had fought many issues arising in prison on their behalf. On his business card, John described himself as a ‘penal reformer and human-rights campaigner’.

  John came to public prominence when he became one of the first prisoners to be held at the now-discontinued control units for subversive prisoners in the 1970s. He took the Home Office to court over the use of the units and pursued the case to the European Court of Human Rights. John wore thick spectacles and was always smartly turned out in a suit, shirt and tie and was well regarded within the criminal fraternity. By the time I met John, he was no longer an active criminal and was always short of money. Despite this, he had recently rejected a £5,000 offer from a tabloid newspaper to set up his good friend Lord Longford. The idea was that he would fool Lord Longford into taking a prostitute into the House of Lords for tea. John was outraged that anybody would even think he would betray a friend’s trust.

  Whilst John was exercising good old-fashioned values, his 1960s counterparts were busy waging a bloody war over drugs. These gangland icons always banged on about never hurting women and children, but they didn’t mind that their drug dealing was the very thing that tears families apart. The first shots fired in this latest drug war were fired into the infamous Great Train Robber, Charlie Wilson. His execution at his villa in Marbella set in motion a catalogue of gangland murders.

  It was reported in the press that Charlie had been murdered on the orders of hard man, robber and drug smuggler Michael Blackmore. A year later, 45-year-old Blackmore was himself gunned down in Amsterdam.

  A Scotland Yard intelligence officer was quoted at the time as saying: ‘Blackmore had a drugs bust up with Wilson and had him rubbed out. They lived by the gun and they died by the gun.’ John Masterson was a friend of Blackmore and attended his funeral at Benchley Gardens Crematorium in south-east London. John had known Blackmore well and told me there was going to be a lot of shit over his death. ‘Reprisals,’ he said, ‘are a certainty.’

  Alan Smith, the man who had ‘survived’ Lambrianou’s ‘hammer attack’ with me, was also a friend of John, having met him on visits to Ronnie. When Alan came down to London, more often than not he would stay at John’s house in Peckham and we would all meet up for a drink. On one such visit, John was telling Alan and me about the tabloid newspaper that had wanted to set up his friend Lord Longford.

  There was a general discussion about the way certain sections of the media behave and somebody said jokingly, ‘Well, why don’t we try to get one over on them?’ Because we had all taken a drink, we were laughing at the very thought of it, but soon we began to kick ideas around.

  John was a good friend of the infamous gangster ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, who had recently been shot in the head outside Turnmills nightclub in Clerkenwell, central London. We talked about how Fraser had survived, although his relative David Brindle had not been so lucky. In a separate incident, two gunman opened fire on Brindle, killing him and an innocent bystander, Stanley Silk, in The Bell public house, Walworth, south London. The media seized upon the recent upsurge in shootings, declaring a gangland war had broken out. Overnight, all gun-related crime across London was being linked by the most dubious of threads.

  Any tourists on a visit to London who read the newspapers would have thought they were in Beirut. According to the media, a similar war had broken out in Glasgow and soon the shootings north of the border and those in London were linked in the press.

  Both Alan and John were Scottish and so the conversation turned to the recent murder of fellow Scot, Arthur Thompson junior. During the 1960s, his father, Arthur Thompson senior, controlled Glasgow in much the same way the Krays controlled London. Arthur senior had ruled Glasgow with an iron fist and was a trusted friend of both Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Arthur junior, or ‘Fat Boy’ as he was known, had been serving a prison sentence for supplying drugs before being gunned down outside his house in Glasgow whilst on weekend home leave. Detectives believed that a London hit-man had carried out the shooting. Hours before Fat Boy’s funeral, Joe ‘Bananas’ Hanlon and Bobbie Glover, two men suspected of his murder, were shot dead and their bodies left slumped in a car on the Thompson funeral route.

  A senior London detective was quoted in the press at the time as saying:

  Things in the underworld are out of control. These are drug wars, plain and simple. The Glasgow mobs are doing business with the London gangs.

  We are trying to find the killers but these are all professional hard men who have learned how to make sure we can’t get the evidence we need. Three things are common to the professional murders in London and Glasgow: all the killers and their victims are connected by big-time crime, they are all involved in the drug business and there have been no arrests.

  After discussing the press reports and consuming vast amounts of alcohol, we came up with the idea that John, who was known in Glasgow and London for his underworld contacts, would go missing.

  The press would be told that Scottish villains who wanted to know who had carried out murders in the recent turf wars had abducted him. John would then suddenly ‘be released’ by his ‘captors’ and sell his dramatic story to the press for several thousand pounds. We were all laughing about it but nobody was really taking it seriously. The following day, we discussed it again and agreed that wi
th the media currently desperate for gangland stories, John could probably get £10,000 if he managed to make his abduction story dramatic enough. It was less risky than committing a crime – the scam wouldn’t harm anybody and the £10,000 would come in handy, so we decided to give it ago.

  Two weeks later, Alan returned to London and parked out of the way whilst John and I went drinking around Peckham. We visited various pubs and ended up in The Heaton Arms. At closing time we left and met Alan at a pre-arranged spot. John got in the car with Alan and drove off. I knocked on the door of a nearby house and told the people who lived there that I had been sprayed in the eyes with CS gas and my friend had been abducted. I kept rubbing my eyes as I wanted to make out I hadn’t been able to see anything in case I was asked for descriptions.

  The man had already telephoned the police, but he became so concerned about my eyes that he also called an ambulance. When it arrived they washed my eyes out and took me to King’s College Hospital. I was trying to stifle my laughter so much that one of the ambulance crew actually thought I was crying. When we arrived at the hospital, they checked me out, the police arrived, recorded my details and left. I was then told that I could go.

  I was rather disappointed that nobody was taking much notice of the fact that John had allegedly been kidnapped. I decided that I would contact the newspapers the following day to set the ball in motion. I spoke to two or three journalists and the following morning John’s ‘abduction’ was reported in several national newspapers.

  The Guardian published the following article:

  KRAY FRIEND MISSING AFTER STREET ATTACK

  Disappearance Follows Series of Underworld Killings

  Police are investigating the disappearance of a south London man who is an associate of both the Kray twins and Lord Longford. It is the latest of a series of incidents, some fatal, involving members of London’s criminal fraternity.