Raiders

Preface

The legend goes that when infamous American outlaw Jesse James first proposed robbing Union banks by walking through the front door armed and during business hours Cole Younger said, ‘Hell, Jesse, ain’t nobody robbed a bank like that before!’ To which the innovative young Mr James is reputed to have replied, ‘Sure, but carts didn’t have wheels until someone thought of ’em.’ Events were to prove Jesse’s pioneering modus operandi very successful indeed as the James/Younger gang went on to rob the modern equivalent of $5 million in their four-year career as bank robbers. And the guns-through-the-front-door technique that worked so well back in the 1860s is still being used by bank robbers all over the world to this day.

Jesse James, first of the modern bank robbers, went down in history as a folk hero and is still revered and idolized, mainly due to the efforts of Hollywood and the American hunger for a history of any kind. America loves its bank robbers, from John Dillinger and Willie Sutton to Bonnie and Clyde (though the latter duo were not strictly ‘bank’ robbers, more spree-killers who nicked a few quid at gunpoint along the way). American outlaws have inspired many books, articles, films and documentaries, which examine their lives and exploits in great detail and it has to be said that not one of them seems to have come out of it in too bad a light.

For some reason, the public, on the whole, seems to have a sort of sneaking admiration for the bank robber. As long as he does not use unnecessary violence on the innocent and gets away with a nice haul from what are basically seen as faceless big-business institutions, then some citizens seem willing to give him a bye. From my own experience, the British public is not that different in outlook to its American cousins when it comes to its home-grown blaggers. I would lay odds that if a survey were done asking the British public to list in order of importance the crimes that frighten them and affect their everyday lives, bank robbery would come pretty far down that list. But put those same people on a jury and let them hear bank staff and customers describe their bowel-emptying terror during a robbery and suddenly they realize that the reality is not some Hollywood caper with handsome and witty actors playing a part but a terrifying and traumatizing ordeal for those involved. Bank robbery is one of those crimes which, when viewed from a distance, would seem to be fairly impersonal and ‘victimless’. But it’s not.

Yet still we make folk heroes of our robbers, and it has been happening for a long time. Think Robin Hood and Dick Turpin: if the James/Younger gang originated the walk-in bank robbery, then Hood and Turpin set the template for modern-day cash-in-transit robbers, who are, in effect, contemporary highwaymen. In the twentieth century the Great Train Robbers immediately spring to mind, with their ‘daring’ 1963 £2 million mail-train robbery. The train robbers and latterly John ‘Public Enemy Number One’ McVicar have achieved iconic status in Britain, with books written by them and about them and in each case a successful film. The British have a tradition of producing the kind of criminals who can plan and execute a daring blag, and in the last fifty-odd years we’ve had some big ones: the Eastcastle Street Post-Office Job (£238,000 cash; 1953), the Great Train Robbery (£2.6 million cash; 1963), the Wembley Bank Robbery (£138,000 cash; 1969), the Security Express Robbery (£6 million cash; 1983), the Brinks Mat Gold-Bullion Robbery (£26 million gold bullion; 1983), the Knights-bridge Safety-Deposit Robbery (£60 million cash plus drugs and diamonds; 1987), the Millennium Dome Diamond Robbery (£200 million in diamonds; 2000), the Northern Bank Robbery in Belfast (£26.5 million cash; 2005), and the Tonbridge Security-Depot Robbery (£25 million cash; 2006). For the sake of accuracy, it should be said that the Knightsbridge job was planned and carried out by an Italian leading a multinational crew and the Millennium Dome job was only an attempt and the robbers were captured on the scene. But there’s no doubt about it, we do love a good heist. By rights, we shouldn’t admire these men, because when it comes right down to it they are no more than parasites too greedy and lazy to work for a living. So why, when we hear that they’ve pulled one off, no matter how much we outwardly tut and shake our heads in disgust, is there still some small part of us that gives a tiny cheer and thumbs its little nose at conventionality? I guess there’s a bit of the rebel in all of us.

For the men who do these things, choosing to commit armed robbery for a living is not something to take lightly. Apart from the obvious minus that when they get nicked, as they inevitably do, they are looking at a very hefty prison sentence (the average sentence for bank robbery with no one physically injured and no shots fired is fifteen years and up), they also have to take into account that they are offering themselves up to specialist armed police squads, some of whom have less than savoury reputations for shooting first and asking questions later – too late. There is also the chance that, carrying a firearm, they might kill someone, through panic and desperation or even by accident, and that means a minimum of thirty years in prison. So it’s not a career that anyone would want to stroll into for the experience. It is a very serious business, and I should know. For nearly thirty years I was an armed robber, not one of the household names, though some of my exploits did occasionally attract headlines in local papers. I was a career criminal, a ‘working’ robber, active almost every week when I was not in prison. Over the years, both inside and out, though mainly in, I met and associated with a lot of armed robbers and, invariably, we exchanged information and stories. In my experience robbers are a different breed to most other criminals – they are flashier, louder, more rebellious and more willing to take risks. They also, I believe, have a better sense of humour and an eye for the absurd. Gather a team of robbers together in any drinking club or prison exercise yard and pretty soon you’ll be hearing their stories, sometimes terrifying, often boastful and arrogant, occasionally sad, mostly hilarious, but always interesting. The stories here are true, and most have been verified through court depositions, media reports and third-party witnesses. The majority were passed to me by word of mouth from those involved and have been written from memory. Only the names and some details have been changed. This has been done to protect the guilty, as well as the innocent.

Personally, I no longer class myself as a criminal. That was something I did in a past life before I found a long and painful rehabilitation. In the parlance of my previous associates in ‘the heavy mob’, I am what is known as a ‘rusty gun’. And to tell you the truth, I don’t miss the old days that much – being coshed, stabbed, shot at and locked up in prison for decades has lost whatever appeal it once had for me. In the following pages I hope you will be able to see that life as a serious career criminal, far from being glamorous and full of glory, is actually a very sad existence with only the grim and unappealing prospect of incarceration or, in some cases, death. Nobody gets away with it – not for long anyway. The men whose stories I tell in the following pages have paid, or are paying even as you read, for their crimes.

I do not condone any crime not committed out of real poverty or desperation, but I am a sucker for a good story. So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to go to work wearing a ski-mask and carrying a sawn-off shotgun, to walk out of a bank with enough money to retire on, or to be shot at by armed police officers, then wonder no more – just read on.

Noel ‘Razor’ Smith

In Prison

2006

1. Tough Tony Takes a Beating

Tough Tony was a man who was very close to me for a very long time. He was a south London robber who had been at the game for many years and looked out of his element when not waving a gun in someone’s face or stalking the landing of a top-security prison. By his own estimate, Tough Tony had been involved in over two hundred armed raids since his teens and had served a total of twenty-three years in prison for some of them. Tony was very proud of the fact that he had never fired a shot on any of his robberies, nor ever had to physically assault anybody. He used to say that if a robber had to resort to actual physical violence then he might as well get out of the game and become a football hooligan. I always thought this lack of ruthlessness on his part was probably the reason why he was still a bread-and-butter robber and had not been invited on to any of the major robbery teams despite his criminal pedigree and experience.

But he was good at what he did. It was said that if Tough Tony couldn’t rob it, then it wasn’t worth two-bob, and if he could, then he would. He was the sort of geezer who was up for anything at the drop of a hat. You only had to turn up at his gaff and offer a bit of work and he would be sitting in the get-away motor with his shotgun on his lap before you’d finished the last word of your sentence. Tony loved to rob, and over the years he told me many stories about the things that happened while he was ‘working’. The story I have included here, which he told me on the exercise yard at HMP Whitemoor in 2001, is one of the best. And here’s how it played out.

It was January 1993 and Tough Tony was not long out of jail, having just served ten years of a fifteen-year sentence for the armed robbery of a post-office security van. Money was pretty tight but he had managed to scrape together enough to buy a double-barrelled sawn-off twelve-bore shotgun, two cartridges for the gun and a cheap Mk5 Ford Cortina – the essential starting pack for any ambitious blagger looking to get back into the game and earn a nice few quid. He’d teamed up with an old pal, a sulphate dealer known as Whizzy, who was also feeling the pinch and didn’t mind doing a bit of driving but drew the line at actually handling a firearm or putting the cosh about. Whizzy was a pacifist and hated violence – except when it was being done for money and to other people – but he was mustard as a wheelman.

Tough Tony was an ‘old skool’ crook, particularly when it came to his crime partners – the get-away driver got 50 per cent of whatever was robbed. After all, Tony figured, and not wrongly in my opinion, the get-away driver was putting himself on offer for at least a seven-stretch if things went King Kong. And seven years in jail is no walk in the park for anyone. Some robbery firms put their drivers on as little as 10 per cent of the take, which can be a nice payday if you’re blagging a couple of mil, but on a standard bit of work this kind of financial disparity can lead to animosity. The last thing you want is to leg it away from the work with alarms going off and armed Old Bill on their way only to find that your wheelman has copped the hump with you and gone for a cuppa. So Tough Tony kept his confederates keen and paid the cost to be the boss.

Whizzy had never driven on a robbery before and Tough Tony was a bit rusty himself from his decade of incarceration so he decided to start with something a bit simple. He picked out a small branch of one of the high street banks, figuring that the till money would come to around five grand, which would be enough for another couple of cheap get-away cars and to get by on while they recce’d a better bit of work. This particular brand of bank was one that Tough Tony had never robbed before, through no particular reason other than he had just never got around to them. He knew that walk-in bank robberies were basically the same no matter the marque of the bank, with only minor refinements needed. The trouble was that Tony had been away at the Greybar Hotel for a long time and bank robberies in London had trebled in number since he was last on the street. The result of this was that some of the household-name banks were taking a tough line on walk-in robberies. Unknown to their customers, certain banks developed a policy of protecting the money at all costs. The cashiers were to drop to the floor in the event of a robbery and keep out of sight. They were behind bullet-proof screens, and if the robber couldn’t see them he could hardly shoot them, let alone get them to hand over the cash. The money and the staff would be perfectly safe, but the suits who devised this plan either gave no thought to, or didn’t give a fuck about, their ‘valuable’ customers, who would be left in the banking hall at the mercy of angry and frustrated men carrying, in many cases, loaded firearms.

A lot of walk-in robbers found out that the only way to get the cashiers out of their hidey-holes was to grab hold of a customer, put the gun up to their head and threaten loudly to execute them unless the money was handed over. This usually worked. But the suits at one well-known high street bank had decided that they would not hand over another penny to robbers, even if they turned every one of their banking halls into a slaughterhouse. Of course, they never made this public but hoped the robbers would eventually get the message and leave them alone. It was one of these banks that Tough Tony chose as his warm-up.

Feeling a little bit nervous, Tough Tony climbed out of the get-away car and leant back in to tell Whizzy that he shouldn’t be long and he was not to move the car from this spot. He straightened his shoulders and shifted the weight of the sawn-off in his waistband underneath his overcoat. As he headed across the pavement he pulled his flat cap low over his face and glanced about for anything suspicious. At the doorway of the bank he unbuttoned his overcoat, got his hand on the butt of the sawn-off and took a deep breath. Tough Tony hit the quiet banking hall like that old cartoon of Tas the Tasmanian devil, shouting at everyone to ‘Stand still!’ and pointing the shotgun threateningly at anyone who did not instantly obey. There were five or six customers in the bank and Tony knew he had to deal with them first and quickly. Snarling, growling and firing dire threats liberally sprinkled with obscenities, Tony herded the cowed customers to the back wall of the bank, well away from the entrance, and turned his attention to the staff. But when he looked behind the jump it was as deserted as the Marie Celeste. Tony, having dealt with most things while engaged in robbery over the years, gave the screen a thump with the butt of his shotgun. ‘Get up, you slags, and start handing over the money or I’ll start shooting these customers!’ He heard a collective gasp from the line of white-faced customers but turned his face towards them and gave a pantomime wink as if to say, ‘Only kidding!’ – though I don’t suppose this did too much to calm their terror. The cashiers made no move to get off the floor and Tony redoubled his threats. ‘If you don’t get up here and hand over the money by the count of three, I’ll shoot two of these people! I fucking mean it!’ When you are in a bluff situation – and Tough Tony was bluffing because he would no more shoot an innocent customer than he would stick his head in an electric cheese-grater – the most foolish thing you can do is impose a time limit on your bluff. Because when that time limit runs out you have to either shit or get off the pot.

‘One!’ As Tough Tony began his count the only other sounds in the banking hall were the sobbing and praying of the poor customers. ‘Two!’ Tony stood at the counter and watched for movement behind the jump, but there was nothing. Surely, he thought, they wouldn’t leave their customers to be shot over a measly bit of till money that was fully insured anyway? He hesitated, then – ‘Three!’ Nothing. Tough Tony couldn’t believe it. This was outrageous! He was severely pissed off at not getting the money, but more so by the idea that the cashiers would callously leave their customers at the mercy of an armed and threatening man. Like most of the robbers I have met, Tough Tony cared not a jot about justice but got the raving hump over injustice. He gave the bulletproof screen another bash with his gun butt and was tempted to fire a shot into it but didn’t want to waste a cartridge. ‘You fucking bunch of cowardly wankers!’ he shouted in frustration through one of the till-wells. ‘I’ll be waiting outside for you cunts one of these dark nights! Mugs!’ He started to leave but then turned to the customers, who were still lined up against the back wall, gibbering wrecks each and every one. Tough Tony shrugged. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘But if I was you I’d change my bank, because if I wasn’t such a nice fella you could all be dead now.’ Then he was gone, out the door and into the get-away car.

Even years later I could hear the bewilderment in Tough Tony’s voice as he spoke about the bank that wouldn’t pay out. He just couldn’t get his mind around the concept of big business being willing and able to sacrifice lives for a few quid. Despite threatening people with a gun for a living, Tony had never shot anybody and was adamant that he never would. ‘I’m there for the money,’ he would say. ‘If I wanted to shoot people I would have joined the police force.’

His first attempt to get back into the game having turned into a bit of a farce, Tough Tony’s confidence had taken a bit of a knock. But he wasn’t ready to give up and go straight just yet. Besides, he wasn’t fit for any other line of work and had been a criminal since before he had left school. His next idea was to play it safe and hit a bank that he had robbed in the past. This is not that unusual among robbers. I know people like to say that lightning never strikes twice in the same place and that criminals never return to the scene of the crime, but that’s just not true in either case. When you’ve had a nice touch from some jug you always keep it in mind to rob again at some stage in the future when things are a bit desperate. Some robbers take this to extremes: another old mate of mine, now deceased, called Little Andy, had his own personal building society which he would rob whenever he was short of cash and couldn’t be bothered working too hard. It got so that when they saw him coming they would put the money up on the counter and not get too involved. He robbed the same premises nine times in fourteen months, and in the end they closed the branch down and sold the building to an estate agent for offices. Anyway, after parking the get-away car up for a couple of days in order for the heat to die down a bit, Tough Tony and Whizzy headed for a bank in Thornton Heath.

This time everything went according to plan and Tough Tony walked out of the bank with £7,500, which was a much-needed boost to his confidence as well as his finances. Now that they had a few quid in the bank, so to speak, Tough Tony and Whizzy could devote their time to searching for a suitable target that would give them a big enough prize to get off the breadline. Tough Tony had a penchant for security vans, cash-in-transit being his preferred kind of robbery. Mostly he went for ‘pony-bags’, which are the small boxes carried across the pavement to the bank by a lone security guard. They are called pony-bags by the criminal fraternity because in criminal parlance a pony is twenty-five, and the bags were insured to contain a maximum of £25,000. Sometimes, to save time, a security guard would, against company policy, take a chance on walking more than one bag across at once, and it was these little lapses that pony-bag robbers lived for. Tough Tony was now on the look-out for a careless guard. He chose Croydon town centre as his hunting ground because of the many advantages it offered the enterprising blagger. The actual shopping centre, a wide road with every kind of bank and retail outlet, was closed to motorized traffic other than emergency services and security vans. Every day the vans of several different cash-in-transit companies would pull into this wide thoroughfare and spend hours making pick-ups from the scores of busy premises. It was so crowded with shoppers and pedestrians that it was easy to blend in and get a good nut at the security guards’ routines. Plus, there were a couple of dozen routes out of the centre by foot, motorbike or car. On the minus side, there was the fact that because so much money passed across the pavement every day there were often ‘spotters’ from the security firms, plain-clothes employees who would plot up and watch for anyone suspicious and be in direct contact with the police. But Tough Tony had been lucky in Croydon in the past and he was determined that he would be again.

For a couple of days Tough Tony mooched around the main shopping thoroughfare, eating soggy burgers, drinking exotically named coffee and generally keeping a sharp but seemingly innocent eye on the comings and goings of the vans and guards. Perhaps because of the spotters, all the guards on the main drag seemed to be very conscientious in their work and stuck to the limit of one pony-bag on the pavement at a time. So Tony decided to expand his circle and check out the sidestreets. It was while he was loitering on one of these sidestreets pretending to read a copy of the Sun while keeping his eyes peeled that he stumbled across a coup so mouth-wateringly delicious that he almost took a bite out of it there and then. A large white security van pulled up at the kerb of a wide expanse of pavement in front of a small row of premises that included a bank and a well-known travel agency. The first thing Tony noticed was that the driver of the van looked about seventeen years old and, instead of checking the surrounding area for suspicious characters and suspect vehicles, as he was supposed to, he seemed more interested in finding the right angle in his wing mirror to check his hair and squeeze a couple of his spots. Tough Tony couldn’t believe how lax about security this youth seemed, but it was great for him and he lapped it up like a saucer of cream.

Next, the door of the van opened and a woman in the livery of the security company stepped out on to the pavement. The female guard was no higher than five foot two and weighed in at a good sixteen stone. Years later, as he was telling me about this, Tough Tony swore that he still had a bruise on his foot where his jaw dropped when he saw her. The female guard waddled around to the cash chute on the side of the van and gave a signal knock on the side. The small steel door flew up to reveal a large security box. From where he was standing Tony could see that this was the holy of holies for the lone or small-team security-van robber – a ton-box. The ton-box has added security devices, such as exploding dye-packs and a screamer alarm (though there are ways in which robbers can neutralize these), so it is insured for up to £100,000 going across the pavement. For Tough Tony this was like an angel had flown down from heaven and sprinkled stardust all over his mooey!

As Tony watched in astonishment the female guard struggled across the wide expanse of pavement with the box. If he’d had his gun on him he would have been very tempted to go and take the box right then. In fact, he seriously contemplated just going and slapping the guard and taking it, but his car was parked over a mile away and he guessed he might look a bit suspicious running through Croydon shopping centre with a screaming, smoking security box. So Tony swallowed. He made a mental note of the time and location and vowed to return the next week as the box finally disappeared through the door of the travel agency.

When Tough Tony described the job he had found, Whizzy was a bit dubious. He couldn’t believe that an easy bit of work like this was presenting itself on the streets of the robbery capital of Britain and suggested that it might be a set-up, a ready-eye by Old Bill in the hope of ambushing a couple of blaggers. To be fair to Whizzy, the Flying Squad, who dealt only in armed robbery in London, had previous for sitting on jobs of this kind, knowing the work would be viewed as a peach by any blagger worth his salt. But Tough Tony was a veteran of the game and could usually smell the Flying Squad from half a mile away and upwind and he was sure they had not been in the area. It was standard to check the surrounding streets, and Tony had been meticulous about this. In the normal course of events, he would have had a radio scanner, usually a top-of-the-range Bearcat, in order to pick up messages over the police wavebands that would give him a clue whether they were near by, but he hadn’t yet got around to buying one. But Tony trusted his instincts, and his instincts said this was a goer. In order to put Whizzy’s mind at ease, Tough Tony agreed that the two of them should go and take another look at the work the following week, before they actually tackled it.

The very next week the lads took up their positions and watched the exact same routine again – the spotty geek driver, the dumpling box-carrier, the near-empty street. It was all perfect. After the van had gone Tough Tony and Whizzy spent over an hour checking out every vantage point from which the Squad could keep a ready-eye and launch an ambush but the whole area was cleaner than a lifeboat captain’s whistle. On the drive back into south London they decided it would go the following week and they would spend the next couple of days making a plan of action.

The plan that Tough Tony came up with was simple. The short sideroad in which the van stopped was a one-way street and a no-parking zone for ordinary traffic, so Whizzy would park the get-away car half up on the pavement with the hazard lights flashing. He would set up one of those plastic ‘Emergency Warning’ triangles behind the car and have the bonnet up as though it had just conked out and he was working on it. Being only twenty-five feet away from the work, Whizzy would have a perfect view of when it went down and that would be his signal to close the bonnet and get ready for the off in the driver’s seat of the get-away motor. Meanwhile, Tough Tony, dressed in his long overcoat and with his flat cap again pulled low over his eyes, would be standing looking at the offers in the window of the travel agency. Under his coat Tony would have his faithful sawn-off shotgun, with a strong piece of string tied to the butt and looped around his neck so that it could hang unseen but be within reach when needed. He would wait for the dumpling with the box to get to within a couple of feet of him and then whip the gun up and demand the box. If all went to plan, and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t, then Tony would be in the get-away car neutralizing the security devices in the box in less than a minute, and within four minutes he and Whizzy would be half a mile away transferring the money to the change-over car, which was parked up in the car park of a block of flats. They went through the plan several times looking for flaws and then they just had to wait for the day of the job.

On the morning of the robbery the lads were up early and raring to go. They knew that by the end of the day they would be considerably richer if all went well, and that’s enough to add a bounce to anyone’s step. Tony drove the change-over car, a ten-year-old but tidy-looking Volkswagen Golf with three months’ tax on the window, up to the car park, tailed in another Mk5 Cortina by Whizzy. Once the Golf was in place Tony took the happy-bag containing the sawn-off and the tool he would need to neutralize the cash box and climbed into the Mk5 with Whizzy. On the way to the work Tony looped the gun round his neck by its lanyard and prepared himself with a couple of deep-breathing exercises. Going on a robbery is no casual affair for anyone except the most stone-faced, nerveless bastards, and most robbers approach it in the same way as an athlete would approach a world-record attempt. You have to loosen your body and then psych yourself up in order to give your best performance. You need to attain a state of total concentration and single-mindedness even as the adrenaline is coursing through your body, churning your stomach and turning your muscles to lead. The big difference between the two professions is that if an athlete comes second he won’t end up shot by the police or serving the next ten-stretch in prison.

At the appointed hour, after a quick cup of coffee in a nearby cafe, Whizzy had the Mk5 up on the pavement with the bonnet up and Tough Tony was trying to make himself inconspicuous with his bogus window-shopping. Ten o’clock, the hour when the van had appeared in the preceding two weeks, came and went with no sign. Tony knew you had to allow for traffic delays, but at 10.10 he was starting to get nervous. He couldn’t go on walking up and down this small parade of shops and businesses indefinitely. Sooner or later someone would start to wonder what his game was. Under his heavy overcoat, and despite the cold January weather, he was starting to sweat like a vicar in a brothel. Then a gimlet-eyed traffic warden turned into the street and made a beeline for the Mk5. Whizzy, covering his panic well, told the warden that he thought his engine had overheated and that the AA were already en route. The warden accepted his story and strolled on looking for easier meat, and both Tough Tony and Whizzy mopped their sweaty foreheads and raised eyebrows at each other from a distance.

At 10.17 Tony was just about ready to walk away from the work and try again the following week when the big white security van hove into view. Tony was relieved to see the familiar sight of the careless spotty geek of a driver and gave Whizzy an almost imperceptible nod as he unbuttoned his overcoat and got ready. Whizzy casually put the bonnet of the Mk5 down and walked to the driver’s door. The passenger door of the security van opened but, instead of the female dumpling, a monster climbed out. Tony described it as looking like a six foot four inch albino silverback gorilla in a guard’s suit. The geezer was huge, with shoulders as wide as most people are long and arms hanging almost to his knees. He adjusted the chin strap of his helmet with hands as big as frying pans and fingers like bunches of bananas and scowled around the street like he was daring someone even to look at him sideways. Tough Tony swallowed hard and felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. The humungous security guard stamped up to the side of the van where the hatch was situated and Tough Tony later swore that when he banged his fist on the reinforced metal of the van he left a dent. The box came sliding out and the guard lifted it like it was made of paper and set out striding across the pavement to where Tough Tony was standing.

There was no way Tough Tony was going to leave the work now that everything was on site. He had been surprised and a bit shaken by the sight of the guard, but size meant nothing when you had an equalizer in the form of a sawn-off doublebarrelled twelve-gauge. Tony had seen some very hard men hang their heads and take a back seat when faced with the threat of a sawn-off and he was guessing that this creature would be no different. When the guard got to within three feet of him Tough Tony spun around and whipped the shotgun up so that it was pointing at his midriff. ‘Drop the fucking box!’ he yelled menacingly. But instead of stopping in his tracks like a normal man faced with such a sight, the big guard never even broke his stride. Instead he swung the metal cash box upwards with such force that it hit the tip of the barrels of Tough Tony’s shotgun and knocked it clean out of his hands. If the gun had not been looped around his neck on a length of string it might have ended up on the roof of the building behind him. As it was, the gun flew into the air, reaching the top of its arc, and then ended up swinging around and hitting Tough Tony square in the back, the string cutting deep into his neck and leaving a friction burn that was still visible three months later. One minute Tough Tony had the gun in his hands and the next he was standing there with nothing. The guard dropped the box and smiled at Tony, but it was the kind of smile that spoke of pain for its recipient, and Tough Tony went cold. For a second neither man moved, and then Tough Tony scrabbled behind his back trying to get his hand on the shotgun. He wasn’t quick enough and the guard hit him in the side of the head with a fist the size of a Christmas ham.

Now Tough Tony didn’t get his nickname for nothing. He’d been a pretty good fist-fighter in his day and a lot of people said he was a bit warm at the old glove game, so he could take a punch. Which was lucky for him because the dig he got from the guard would have felled a donkey. It knocked Tony backwards up against the window of the travel agency and trapped the shotgun firmly between his back and the glass. The guard wrapped one big hand tightly around Tony’s throat and drew his fist back to punch him again with the other. By this time Tony was in a panic, but he managed to flail out and catch the guard in the eye with a loose finger, which made him automatically release his grip on Tony’s throat and cover his injured eye. But the finger-in-the-eye coup wasn’t going to stop this geezer for too long and Tony knew his only hope was to get hold of the shotgun. He had never shot anyone in his life, but if he could get his hands on the gun this fella was going to be the first. Unfortunately for Tony but fortunately for the guard, the gun had become entangled in the folds of his overcoat and he couldn’t quite get a grip on it. The guard, seeing what Tony was up to, threw another massive punch and caught him on the cheekbone. This time Tough Tony went down. He hit the hard pavement with a thump that knocked all the breath out of him and the guard dropped on top of him and began throwing punches at his face.

While all this was going on, Whizzy was sitting in the car watching the action in the rear-view mirror. Every time Tough Tony got a dig Whizzy would wince in sympathy, but there was no way he was going to leave the safety of the car and get involved. Fisticuffs was not Whizzy’s forte – he much preferred to iron out any differences with a game of Monopoly. He could see that the guard was getting the better of Tony and knew that it was reaching the stage where he was going to have to do something or they could both end up nicked. So after a moment’s contemplation, during which Tough Tony took a big right-hander that split his eyebrow and almost finished him off, Whizzy swung the passenger door of the Mk5 open and threw the stick into reverse. Looking back over his shoulder at the mêlée on the pavement, he gunned the engine and took his foot off the clutch.

Tough Tony may not have actually been in hell but he was certainly standing in the doorway of it. The guard was beating the shit out of him and actually laughing as he was doing it, and the pain as each granite fist pounded his tender flesh was almost excruciating. Tony was still desperately clinging to the thought that if he could reach the gun everything would be sweet, so now his left arm was trapped under his body seeking for cold metal and warm wood. He told me later that he was glad he hadn’t got his finger to the triggers because he was in such a state that he probably would have pulled them just to take the guard’s attention off his poor face. If he had pulled even one of the double-barrel’s triggers while it was underneath him and tangled in his coat, he might have shot himself. As it was, he was near to passing out and still couldn’t reach the gun. He took a hard punch that split the other eyebrow and made him see yet more stars and the warm blood filled his eye socket, leaving him half blind. He didn’t just lie there and take it, he struggled and thrashed his head about trying to dodge the blows, but he was growing weaker by the second, and it got to the stage where he knew he could take no more punishment. He was going under. Even his good eye was starting to blur at the edges. And then, suddenly, the guard was gone. It was as though he had just flown away.

Whizzy had reversed the Mk5 up on to the pavement at high speed and either through luck or fantastically good judgement had hit the security guard with the open passenger door, causing him to be launched from the prostrate and bleeding figure of Tough Tony. The guard did three full somersaults through the air and hit the hard pavement ten feet away. Whizzy didn’t stop to think, he just leant over and grabbed Tough Tony by the collar of his overcoat and dragged his head and shoulders up on to the door sill. ‘Get in!’ he screamed, and without waiting to see if his confederate was capable of following this order, he rammed the stick into second gear, gunned the engine and took off, leaving an inch of rubber on the pavement. Tough Tony was in bits and as weak as a kitten but he managed to cling on to the car for the first twenty feet, his body and legs dragging along the pavement. ‘Help me!’ he managed to croak, and Whizzy, seeing that Tony was not in the passenger seat, jammed on the anchors.

By this time, the street had all but come to a standstill as pedestrians and motorists alike had stopped to watch the real-life action movie unfolding before them. The cash box was lying on its side on the pavement emitting a high-pitched screech and sending up a cloud of foul-smelling red signal smoke. The driver of the security van had activated his alarm as soon as he noticed something going on and all the lights on the van were flashing in unison as a very loud recording of a mechanical-sounding voice informed everyone within a large radius, ‘We are being robbed! Please notify the police immediately!’, over and over like a robotic parrot. Parts of the otherwise pristine pavement were stained with splashes of Tough Tony’s blood and burnt rubber from the Mk5’s tyres, and the guard was lying on his back with his feet in the gutter.

Whizzy reached over and pulled Tony further into the car. He flopped into the passenger seat and managed to mumble, ‘Go! Go!’ through bloody and mangled lips. Whizzy put his foot down again but released the clutch too quickly and the Mk5 jumped forward, then stalled. As Whizzy quickly reached for the ignition key, he saw something in his rear-view mirror that almost made him shit his pants. ‘Oh fuck!’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘He’s fucking coming!’ The guard had been stunned by the impact of the Mk5’s passenger door and made dizzy by his tumbling flight but he wasn’t badly injured and had got back on to his feet as Whizzy was pulling Tough Tony into the car. He shook his huge head and then took off running towards the Mk5. Someone had tried to rob him and the fun wasn’t over just yet.

Inside the car Tough Tony was moaning in agony and bleeding all over himself while Whizzy frantically keyed the motor. At last the engine burst into life and the Mk5 shot out into the road and away from the fast-approaching security guard. They left him clutching no more than a cloud of exhaust fumes, and Whizzy breathed a sigh of relief. When they had put a couple of streets between the scene of the crime and themselves Whizzy relaxed and turned to the ruin of what was once Tough Tony’s face and said, in all seriousness, ‘Did you get the money?’ Tough Tony told me that if he’d had the strength at that moment he would have got Whizzy in a headlock and rammed his head off the windscreen several times. But all he could do was moan and bleed some more.

Tough Tony spent the next week in bed. When he finally did venture out his face was still sporting the colours of the rainbow. The day’s excitement had been a bit too much for Whizzy and he decided that armed robbery was not really his game, so he retired and went back to small-scale drug deals. Tough Tony never forgot the loyalty he had shown by rescuing him from the giant guard and whenever he’s out of jail and has a nice touch he always bungs Whizzy a nice few quid. In time, Tough Tony went back to work and eventually joined a little crew who were having it off by robbing night deliveries to cash-machines. These days he’s serving seven years for sawing the barrels off a shotgun, a serious criminal offence, believe it or not, and for being in possession of the gun with intent. I don’t think Tough Tony will ever change his ways – he’s invested too much of his life into what he is – but stranger things have happened. Just look at me. At one stage of my life I was Tough Tony in so many ways.

2. Big Bad Bob, the Water-Pistol Bandit, and How He Hit the Big One

Big Bad Bob was a Scotsman and in his mid-forties when I first met him on D wing of Wandsworth prison in 1989. He already had a long criminal career behind him and was serving nine years for armed robbery committed in his native Scotland. How Bob came to be in an English prison as far south as Wandsworth was a story typical of his untrustworthiness and low cunning. Soon after getting his nine-stretch he was transferred to one of the newer Scottish jails, HMP Schotts, in Lanarkshire. The regime was a bit lax then as most of the screws were brand-new on the job. Bob’s father was pretty ill at the time so, despite having served only a year of his sentence, he applied for a compassionate parole in order to visit him at home. Bob, like a lot of criminals who eventually gravitate to armed robbery, was a pretty personable man, and it was said that he could charm the birds from the trees, though I must admit I always viewed him as the stereotypical dour Scotsman. Perhaps that’s because I never had anything he wanted bad enough to bother turning the charm on. Anyway, Bob was granted a few hours’ parole, during which he was to be escorted by two young and inexperienced screws, handcuffed to one of them at all times. On the journey to his dad’s house Bob was the life and soul of the sweatbox, cracking jokes, telling stories and generally geeing the two trainee turnkeys up. So by the time they landed at the house, the dim uniformed twosome thought Bob was a great fella and not at all as bad as some of the neds they had to deal with on a daily basis back at the jail. All was going well until Bob, as per his plan, suddenly had an attack of diarrhoea and confessed a desperate need to use the toilet. The screws, not wanting to appear insensitive to the needs of their new best friend, decided it would be OK to take the handcuffs off as long as Bob gave his word of honour that he wouldn’t try and have it on his toes. Big Bad Bob, the expression of a newly whelped spaniel on his villainous features, swore on a stack of holy bibles ten feet high that he would not try to leg it, and the screws took him at his word. Needless to say, five minutes after the cuffs were removed Bob was on his way to England as fast as his legs would carry him.

Once he arrived in London Big Bad Bob got to work plying his trade as an armed robber. He had a pretty clever MO when it came to blagging, and it was one that was to work a treat in the Smoke. As he worked alone and never used a real gun, a water-pistol being his ‘weapon’ of choice, Bob usually targeted small financial establishments where there were only one or two cashiers to deal with. In his native Scotland it had been building societies, but in London he noticed there were several small bureaux de change where tourists could swap their traveller’s cheques and native currency for the coins and notes of the realm. These premises usually had no more than two cashiers so Bob decided to give one a try. His robberies were never very financially rewarding and Bob would be quite happy to get two or three grand from his graft, enough to get him a decent hotel for a couple of weeks, a mid-range prostitute to service his needs and a few wee drams of an evening. All-in-all Bob was a pretty simple man and lived each day as it came.

He would find a small bureau de change he liked the look of and then have a good mooch around the area to check his get-away routes and any police presence. Bob couldn’t drive so he always made his get-away on foot, or by public transport if the opportunity presented itself. One thing that was essential for the operation was that there was a public telephone near by. Don’t forget, this was in the 1980s when mobile phones were playthings of only the richest yuppies and cocaine dealers