A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun

And most of all, those who have been the most constant light in my life – Denise, Dean, Joe and Lianne.

Andy caught my eye from the public phone-box across the street and grinned nervously. His voice crackled loudly in my earpiece.

‘Just unloading now,’ he said. We were using hands-free mobile phones, and we kept communications to the minimum.

I nodded slightly, and turned my gaze toward the plate-glass windows of the Midland bank, which was situated to the left of the phone-box. I could see the blue crash helmets of the two security guards as they handed over the money-box to the chief cashier. Despite the cold, my back felt clammy under the layers of clothing, and my mouth was drier than a witch’s tit.

I turned slightly and nodded to Danny. He was pretending to be engrossed in the small-ad cards in the window of a newsagents, but he had one eye on me. He shrugged and slapped his gloved hands together against the cold. He was ready. I hunched my head into my upturned collar and spoke into the hands-free mike without moving my lips: ‘T? It’s a “go”. Start her up.’ Tommy was parked around a corner in the getaway car, monitoring the airwaves.

My heart rate kicked up a gear as the adrenaline began to flood my body I was itching to be on the move, and it took all of my willpower to keep standing still and outwardly calm. This was the moment that every adrenaline junkie lives for; the intoxicating rush that comes from knowing that you are about to step into a dangerous unknown. Professional robbers call this ‘the buzz’, and it can be just as addictive and destructive as any Class A drug habit.

The two guards came out of the bank and climbed back into their security van. The driver indicated and pulled out into traffic. I was vibrating like a tuning fork. I took a deep breath which seemed to shudder into me. My limbs were starting to feel leaden, as though I was rooted to the spot. I suddenly felt very tired and knew it was the effect of an adrenaline overload. It was flight or fight time. I swallowed, hard, and my mind let out a massive roar – ‘GO!’

As soon as I stepped off the pavement it was like the world had just come into sharp focus. My senses switched to maximum input; I could taste acrid exhaust-fumes on my tongue, I could hear the click-click-click of a car indicating at the traffic lights and the tension-heavy breathing of Danny as he fell into step beside me. We crossed the road at a brisk pace, our eyes seeking and checking every parked vehicle and shop doorway one final time. As a team we were top of the Flying Squad’s ‘most wanted’ list, and they loved nothing more than a ‘ready-eye’ ambush. Their propensity to shoot first and shout warnings only when the gunsmoke had cleared was legendary.

Andy stepped from the phone-box and fell into step behind our march across the wide pavement. As I reached for the door of the bank a strange and unfamiliar thought fleetingly crossed my mind: ‘You can stop now. It’s not too late to walk away’ My hand hesitated six inches from the door handle, and Danny bumped into me. I immediately forced the treacherous notion from my consciousness and pushed the door open.

As I stepped into the bank I was instantly aware of a rush of warm air on my chilled face and the hum of quiet conversation coming from the banking hall. We slid through the familiar motions like a well-oiled robbery machine. Woollen hats were pulled down over features to reveal only eyes and mouth. Danny produced a fearsome-looking fireman’s axe, Andy shook out a folded plastic bag and I got a good grip on the gun.

We had honed our performance over many such bank robberies. We each had a part to play and we knew those parts intimately. I was always the gunman, the ‘heavy’, the ‘frightener’; it was my job to put the fear of God into bank staff and civilians and make sure everything ran smoothly and quickly. Any ‘have-a-go heroes’ would be dealt with by me. I was first man in and last man out. Danny was the ‘doorman’; his job was to make sure nobody left the premises before the job was done. He also had to make sure that anyone who came in while the robbery was in progress stayed in. Andy was the ‘bagman’. He would collect and bag up the cash.

There were two customers in the banking hall, both males in their mid-thirties. Four cashiers, including the chief cashier, were busying themselves behind the counter along with several clerical staff. I came into the hall like a whirlwind. Before anyone knew what was happening I had my pistol pointed at a customer’s head.

‘Down! Get the fuck down!’ I roared menacingly.

He dropped like a stone, and the other customer quickly followed. I stepped up to the counter and pointed the gun at the bullet-proof screen so the staff could get a good look at it.

‘You all know the drill,’ I shouted. ‘We’re here for the reserve. No fucking about, just hand it over and no one gets shot.’

Andy was already up at the counter, bag at the ready, but the staff were still in shock. I was used to this, and I knew how to get them moving. I stood over one of the downed customers and pointed the gun at his head. I pointed my free hand at the chief cashier.

‘Move!’ I screamed. ‘Or I’ll put his brains all over the carpet!’

One of the women cashiers gave a little groan and then fainted.

The chief cashier, an Asian man with a pencil moustache, hurried forward and began to unlock his safe. I kept the gun pointed at the customer. He had both his hands crossed over his head and he was sobbing in terror. The second customer looked up at me, anger on his face. I switched the gun to him. ‘Who you fucking looking at? You even attempt to get off that fucking floor and I’ll put one in you,’ I growled at him.

He put his head back down.

Andy was loading the packets of money into the bag as fast as they came across the counter. We had been told that there would be £100,000 in cash in the reserve. For a moment the only sounds in the banking hall were the sobbing of the customer and the swish of the packets hitting the bag. I looked over at Danny. He had his back to us, keeping his eyes on the street outside. A movement behind the jump caught my eye and I saw one of the clerical staff duck into a back office. Probably gone to press the silent alarm. It didn’t matter, we were just about finished.

‘How we doing, Number Two?’ I called to Andy.

He brushed the last packets into the bag with his arm, then gave me a thumbs-up. ‘That’s the lot,’ he said. ‘Unless you want me to get the cash drawers as well?’

There might be another five grand in the cash drawers, and so far we were ahead of schedule. ‘Fuck it, get the lot,’ I said.

I knew I was pushing it, but the buzz was on me strong and I was reluctant to end it, the comedown was a bitch. I knew that even if the silent alarm had been activated it would take a good eight minutes before the police would be on their way. The alarm would sound at the bank’s security HQ; they would try to confirm that it had not been pushed by accident, then notify the nearest police station and Flying Squad office, who would then have to radio whoever was close and mobile. The chances of being caught in the commission of a robbery, unless the police knew in advance, were very low.

Only one of the cash drawers was unlocked, so the cashiers had to come forward and unlock their own drawers. After the third one, even I was getting itchy. I looked up at the security cameras that dotted the banking hall; they had been getting some cracking smudges from the moment we burst in. It was time to go.

‘How many left, Number Two?’ I asked.

‘Three more,’ said Andy.

‘Leave them,’ I said. ‘We’re off.’

Andy came past me, clutching the bag in both arms, and headed for the door. I heard Danny in my earpiece, checking with Tommy and letting him know we were on our way out. I stepped over to the customer who had given me the angry look. I crouched down by his head and kept the gun pointed at him. He looked up at me and still looked pissed off.

‘It ain’t your money, pal,’ I said. ‘Now, it’s all over and nobody’s been hurt. So just fucking chill out. ‘Cos if you try to come after us, I won’t hesitate to kill you. Understand?’

He nodded.

I joined the rest of the team at the door. This was the most dangerous moment for us. If anyone had noticed anything suspicious we could be walking out into an ambush. We had only been inside the bank for a few minutes, but the street outside was once again unchecked territory. I held open the door and let Andy and Danny slip out. I glanced back into the banking hall to make sure the customers were still prone. I stepped out, pocketed the gun and rolled my mask up into a hat. The boys were waiting for me, and they had rolled their masks up too. We walked briskly away.

My scalp was crawling and my back felt like one huge target as we hurried across London Road. I kept expecting to hear the sounds of shouting or gunfire, but nothing happened. We reached a sidestreet and ducked into the alley where Tommy was waiting behind the wheel of a four-door Vauxhall with the engine running. We piled into the car and drove sedately away without attracting any attention.

By the time we reached the flop, I was really feeling the comedown. My hands were shaking, my guts were churning, and I had the makings of a blinding headache. For every high there is a low. Normally, the fact that we had got away with the prize would be enough to buoy me up, but all I felt was sick, and slightly depressed. I remembered how I had hesitated on reaching the bank door. That was a first for me. I had always been supremely confident when committing crime: it was my element. I craved the feeling of power from taking over a strip of pavement or a banking hall and imposing my version of reality on it, for even a short time. It was a rush that no amount of cocaine or Ecstasy could imitate. But now I just felt guilty.

The boys were laughing and joking as they emptied the money on to the floor. Cruising on post-job euphoria and relief, they seemed like children let loose in a chocolate factory. Big, ugly kids, mind you. Andy held up two sealed packets of £50 notes and kissed each one in turn. Tommy and Danny were singing a chorus of ‘We’re in the Money’. I flopped into an armchair and peeled off my surgical gloves. The gun was digging into my ribs, so I pulled it from my pocket, checking that the safety-catch was on. I had always liked guns, and I had a particular liking for the weight and feel of the Walther. Guns were the tools of my trade, and without them I would not be able to make such a good living. A good gun is to be prized and taken care of, and the Walther was a good gun. I had paid £500 for it, which was about average for a handgun in London. It had been nicked off a burglary out in the sticks by a couple of junkies. I had only fired it twice, but the Walther had served me well. Now, looking at it, I felt an irrational loathing for it. For the first time, I saw how ugly and evil it must look to someone who has it pointed in their face. It felt too smooth and oily, too black and deadly. I dropped it on the floor and wiped my hand on my T-shirt.

I lit a cigarette and leant back in the chair. Images from the bank flooded my mind: the shocked faces of the cashiers, the woman who fainted, the sobbing customer who thought he was going to die and the anger and, yes, contempt on the face of the second customer. What were they doing now, right at this moment? Telling their story to the police? Struggling to recover from their ordeal? I had never given a second thought to my victims before. When you do what I do for a living you can’t afford to think of the target as having any human dimension. It’s them or me. They’ve got it and I want it, and if anything gets in my way, tough.

I had always had this strange notion that armed robbery was an honourable profession. I didn’t go around coshing pensioners for their bingo money, or burgling people’s homes or raping women and children; I was the cream of the criminal classes, a ‘blagger’, one of the heavy mob, a modern-day highwayman. I didn’t steal from poor people’s pockets, I robbed the rich, the banking and insurance institutions. People who could afford it. The only Victims’ of my crimes were the faceless money-shufflers who had to tally up what was nicked. I was almost a Robin Hood figure, for fuck’s sake! Or was I?

Not once in my life had I questioned my criminality. I just accepted it as my lot. I embraced the life of crime and punishment as though it was my only friend. I loved the excitement and danger of living life on the edge, the vagaries of fate deciding whether I would be shot, stabbed or nicked. I craved the recognition of being a ‘face’ in, and out of, prison, and I loved the respect I got from others in my world. I relished the courtroom battles in which I could pit my wits against the top people in the educated straight world, and sometimes beat them at their own game. What else could someone like me hope for? It was odds on I was never going to play midfield for Chelsea and marry a popstar.

Why was I feeling like this? Is this how it happens? Can you suddenly just have enough of something, get so sated that it begins to make you sick? I could imagine eating so many cream cakes or crabsticks or watching so many Chuck Norris videos that they would make me ill; but this was my life I was thinking about. I tried to analyse what might be different about today that would make me think like this. Maybe I was losing my bottle. I was thirty-seven years old and I had been committing armed robberies since I was fifteen. Most of my life had been spent either in prison or on the run. What a waste. And here I was, fast approaching middle age, doing the same old self-destructive shit I had always done. I felt uncomfortable with these thoughts.

I watched the boys as they counted the money. No one noticed that I didn’t join in. Andy and Danny were experienced robbers; they had both already served long prison sentences in some of the toughest jails in the country for it. Tommy, the wheel-man, had a background in cannabis cultivation, for which he had served time in the same prisons as the rest of us, and had only joined the team originally to get the cash to bankroll a huge skunk-growing operation. But, like the rest of us, once he got a taste for the money and excitement, everything else took second place.

We were a good team – staunch, loyal and totally committed to our profession and each other. I would trust these men with my life and I knew they felt the same about me. When not ‘working’, we socialized with each other and each other’s families. One phone-call in times of trouble, from any of us, would be enough to get the other three to drop everything and come running.

On the surface we had our lives sorted. We made decent money and had plenty of leisure time in which to spend it. But deep inside, we all knew that one day – maybe tomorrow, maybe next week – we could be brought to book and forced to pay for what we were doing. Our payment might involve a bullet in the head from a Flying Squad ambush or a long stay in a top-security prison via the Old Bailey. We were professional career criminals and we knew the score. The best we could hope for was a good long run before the hammer dropped. We would cram as much ‘good living’ as we could into whatever time we had, storing up experiences as memories to sustain us during the bad decades. Every single moment was lived to the full and then carefully packed away; we were like bears gorging themselves before hibernation.

Nobody spoke about going back to prison. That kind of thing was a bok, a bad omen, and I have never met a robber who was not superstitious. We all had our little good-luck moves. Andy, though not religious, would cross himself before stepping into a bank. Danny always had to wear the same Reebok jacket on a bit of work and walk the getaway route the day before the job. Tommy had his lucky driving-gloves. And me? I always removed one bullet from the gun and put it in my pocket. The rituals of armed robbery.

We would hit two or three targets per month, mainly banks, working on snippets of information given, or bought, from our vast network of criminal associates, or sometimes from unsuspecting members of the ‘straight-going’ public. Mini-cab drivers are the best, they just cannot keep their mouths shut for five minutes. When the first Ikea superstore opened in Croydon, they had an account with local mini-cab firms to ferry their management to and from work. I learned that they had taken a quarter of a million pounds on their first weekend and that they were worried about their ‘sub-standard security’ just by talking to a mini-cab driver who drove Ikea’s accounts manager and his secretary to work. The driver had no idea that I was a robber, but I gave him a £10 tip at the end of my journey and took his personal card for future reference. Coming a close second to mini-cab drivers in the information stakes are disgruntled employees who think that what they blurt out in their local pub at the weekend is covered by the rules of the confessional. The information is out there, floating around all the time, and there are people who make a good living from catching it and selling it on.

In reality, by the final decade of the twentieth century, bank-robbery had become a dying game. Gone were the halcyon days of the 1960s and 70s, when an enterprising young blagger could vault the counter of his local Nat West and put a bit of cosh about before scarpering with one hundred large. The days of sawn-off shotguns on the highstreet at lunchtime, sawn-off jeans on the beach in Marbella at teatime, were nothing more than a warm, fuzzy memory for most of the heavy mob. During the Thatcher era, the sensible blagger invested his ill-gotten in the drugs boom and then retired to the Costa del crime to count his profits.

Robbing banks became passé, a mug’s game, fit only for desperate junkies who wielded fake guns and didn’t have enough sense to wear a mask. At best, all they could get was the till money – enough to keep them in skag heaven for a couple of weeks; and also enough to get them twelve years in jail. The real money came from robbing money in transit or from kidnapping supermarket managers and making them hand over the takings. You could still stick up security guards walking across the pavement, but the insurance limit had dropped to fifteen grand a bag, and they were only allowed to carry one bag at a time. And security had come a long way from the days when the guard was equipped with a police whistle. Now there was CCTV everywhere, and there were bank screens that shot up to the ceiling, screamer-alarms, exploding dye-packs, automatic-locking bank-doors, bullet-proof glass, tracking devices in the money-packs and security vans that emitted a loud electronic warning when a robbery was in progress.

The police had also upped their game and were now more willing to shoot first and shout warnings later. The names of the men who had been shot dead by the police in ambush were well known to all of us. Some of them had been friends and associates. The Flying Squad (Special Operations 8) dealt only with armed robbery in London, and they cherished their reputation as hard, violent coppers. Trojan Units also cruised the streets of London twenty-four hours a day, armed ‘gunships’ just waiting for a radio-call that would allow them to unleash their awesome weaponry on the unsuspecting robber.

But the professional robber is nothing if not resourceful, and in the last years of the 1990s bank robbery, against all odds, was going through something of a renaissance. This was due to one small piece of information, known only to a handful of blagging teams in the capital. It became known that there was one small window of opportunity in the routine of certain banks when large amounts of cash were vulnerable. This was known to us as The Reserve Game’. The reserve is the cash that every bank will need in order to carry out its business over the month. This cash has to be delivered by a security firm, and as most bank vaults work on a time-lock and the delivery van could be held up in traffic, the exact time of this delivery cannot be known in advance. The day is known, and whether the delivery will be in the morning or the afternoon, but the rest is just an estimate. So when the reserve arrives, instead of going straight into the vault, it is locked into a small safe under the chief cashier’s counter.

For us the hard work was in finding out which day the reserve was expected, and this was mainly done by picking a good-sized bank and putting it under observation for a while. If six cash-bags were delivered on a Thursday afternoon, it was odds on that this was the reserve. Then it was just a matter of being ready to go in as soon as the van left after its next delivery. We didn’t have to call attention to ourselves by pulling guns and rolling about on the pavement with the guards, we could just take it from the chief cashier. It did not always work out. Sometimes we got the timing wrong and had to be content with robbing the till money, but we chalked that up to experience and moved on to the next target.

We knew we were on the Flying Squad’s ‘most wanted’ list by now, but what we didn’t know was that we were the subject of regular briefings by three of the four London squads. Tower Bridge squad had nicknamed us ‘The Laughing Bank-Robbers’ because while robbing the Midland Bank in Clapham on Christmas Eve we had worn Santa hats over our ski-masks and wished staff and customers a ‘merry Christmas and a happy New Year’ before making our getaway with a few timely ‘ho, ho, ho’s. We gave the expression ‘laughing all the way to the bank’ a new meaning. When you cop for thirty large the day before Christmas it does tend to lighten your mood, no matter what line of work you’re in.

The team had finished counting the cash, and the notes were stacked up nicely, most of it still in plastic packets. Andy worked out the total on a pocket calculator.

‘Not as much as we expected,’ he said, ‘but still a nice little earner.’

I nodded. ‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Forty-two thousand, three hundred and seventy. That’s forty G from the reserve, and the rest is till-money. About a ton and a half of the till-money is scrag-ends.’

Scrag-ends are the odd and damaged notes that find their way into every bank-till eventually. Scottish banknotes, ripped notes, burned notes and notes damaged by exploding dye-packs. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Burn the scrag. The odd two hundred goes into the kitty for exes. That leaves ten and a half grand each. Do the share-out, Andy, and make sure the fifties and the brand-new notes are shared out evenly’

As we all came from different parts of London, an even share of any notes that might be traceable would save them all turning up in the same area and giving Old Bill a clue.

As Andy sorted the cash into even shares, the rest of us gathered up the robbery kit: coats, masks, gloves and weapons were bagged up ready for depositing in our hired lock-up. The slaughter was paid for in cash and hired under a false name that could not be traced back to any of us, and the robbery kit would be stored there until the morning of our next job. One of the things we had learned from previous nickings was never to keep evidence around where it could be tied in to us. Though we knew from experience that the Squad would not hesitate to plant evidence to get a conviction, it was not the done thing to make it too easy for them.

Tommy got busy putting a joint together, some of his own-grown skunk. He used a dye-stained £10 note from the small pile of scrag to light it. I dutifully took a couple of puffs when it was passed to me, but I didn’t feel much like getting stoned. I went over to the window and cracked the curtains. It was getting dark outside and, apart from the usual late-afternoon traffic, everything seemed quiet and normal. We had got away with it again, and though I should have been filled with happy relief, I just felt strange and empty.

Danny volunteered to deposit the happy-bag in the slaughter, as he would be passing it on his way back to North London. He had his own legal motor parked up a couple of streets away from the flop, but the rest of us had to phone for cabs. We had reached the flop in the getaway car, which was now well ablaze in an underground car park half a mile away. Our ‘changeover car’ was parked across the road from the flop, and if it was still there on Monday it would be used as the getaway car on our next bit of work.

I was responsible for buying all the cars we used on our jobs. I sometimes spent a Saturday afternoon cruising the used-car forecourts looking for suitable rides. They had to be respectable-looking, four-doored and have at least a month’s worth of tax on the windscreen. We could ill afford a tug for no tax when we were tooled up and plotted on a bit of work. I paid cash for the cars and claimed it back from the exes off the job. The normal price range I dealt in was between £150 and £400. The cars never had to go far.

Danny gathered his cash and the happy-bag, and made his goodbyes before heading off. We would all be meeting up the next day for a drink and a few lines of charlie in a safe boozer we knew over in Camden Town, just four middle-aged, obviously affluent blokes who sometimes talked in whispers and played pool for £50 a game. The governor of the pub called us ‘the Four Yuppies’ in his jocular Irish manner, but he always invited us to stay for the lock-in.

Tommy went next. We had all phoned different cab firms and requested cabs at half-hourly intervals so we weren’t seen walking out of the flop like a gang. Tommy had changed into a suit and tie and, with his money in a cheap briefcase, he looked like a slightly stoned tax inspector. When he was gone I had a chance to talk to Andy.

Andy was my best pal on the team. We had been through a lot together, fought and plotted our way through the hardest jails in the country and partied like lunatics when times were good. Once, during an escape attempt from a prison in Dorset, Andy had managed to scramble up our home-made rope to the top of the prison wall, but when I tried, the rope snapped about half-way up the wall and left me stranded inside the prison grounds. Andy could have dropped to freedom, and he was serving a ten-year sentence, but he didn’t hesitate, he dropped back into the prison. ‘If you don’t go, then I don’t go,’ was his explanation.

‘I think I might be losing my bottle,’ I blurted out.

Andy broke up laughing and told me to leave the skunk alone because it was making me paranoid. I explained about my hesitation at the door of the bank, and how I kept thinking about the way the geezer in the banking hall had looked at me.

‘Fuck him,’ Andy replied. ‘He’s just some nine-to-five mug, a straight-goer. Who gives a fuck what them people think?’

I was silent for a moment, trying to collect my thoughts, and then I said, ‘Let me ask you this, do you ever think about the people we rob? Do you ever feel that we shouldn’t be doing this? Does it ever feel wrong to you?’

Andy looked serious and shook his head. ‘Nope. I don’t think about it at all, and neither should you. All we do is put the frighteners on them so we can claim the prize. Nobody gets killed, and nobody gets seriously hurt unless they go begging for it. Now forget this shit. This is what we do, and we do it well.’

His explanation might easily have been my own, and there was some relief for me in his confirmation. I shrugged and smiled. ‘Yeah. Fuck ‘em!’ I said.

All the talk about people who have ‘paid their debt to society’, and how the Criminal Justice System will do everything to ‘reintegrate the ex-offender’, it’s all bullshit. If you break the law and go to prison for it, you’re an outcast from then on, and no matter what you do with the rest of your life, there will always be someone to remind you that you don’t really belong. Employment is the prime example, but there are other things, such as when you try to enter another country for a holiday and get treated as an ‘undesirable’ or when you get stopped for a routine check by traffic police and find that after they have run your details through the PNC (Police National Computer), you are no longer ‘sir’ but ‘sunshine’. Society does not want criminals reintegrated, it wants them where it can see them, out on the fringes.

Many ex-prisoners reoffend precisely because they are made to feel like outsiders. It is a never-ending cycle: the more you break the law, the less you fit in; and the less you fit in, the more you have to break the law. They should tattoo every criminal on the forehead and fit revolving doors on every prison and drop all this self-serving bollocks about ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘reintegration’. The sad truth is that it becomes clear to the lawbreaker pretty early on in his career that he is marked for life. If by the age of eighteen you already have a stay in youth custody under your belt, the chances are you’re heading for adult prison. Of course, there are those few who manage successfully to put their youthful indiscretions behind them and make a decent and honest life for themselves. It does happen – if you get out early enough, get a bit of luck and don’t ever want to emigrate or stand for Parliament.

I had tried a bit of the straight world. I found myself sweeping roads on council estates for a take-home wage of £109 per week. I had served eleven years, paying my debt to society, and as an incentive to leave the exciting and lucrative business of crime, I was offered a broom and a grotty bed-sit, which was no more than a cell that I could lock myself in. I only got the job because I had a friend on the council who convinced them it would not be worth my while to nick the broom, and the wages were so bad I was forced to live on Cup-a-Soup and toasted carpet for three days a week. It wasn’t as bad as being in prison, but it ran a close fucking second.

I don’t blame anyone for my situation. You can’t spend all your life fucking things up and then cry foul on someone else for what you’ve done, I know that. And knowing that you have only yourself to blame doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. My family gave me what support they could, both moral and financial, but there was only so much I would allow them to do. Being on the streets from a young age and making my own way in the world, I developed a fierce pride in my independence. I would rather steal than beg, and though accepting help from my family could never be construed as begging, it still did not sit right with me. The way I saw it, they were doing their best to get by, and they didn’t need the added burden of me. The life I had chosen had already made them the victims of my actions for too long. I’ve lost count of the times that gangs of armed police have kicked in the doors of homes of members of my family in the early hours of the morning, looking for me. My family have travelled the length and breadth of the country to visit me in prison, and have been there for me in my moments of direst need. My thinking has always been that if I stand alone, then I won’t take anyone with me if I fall.

I stuck at the straight life for four months before accepting the inevitable. I dumped my broom and shovel back at the council yard and made the phone-call that got me straight back into crime. Within a week I had a studio flat in Croydon, a nice car and money in my pocket. In the criminal world employment was never a problem, and my previous convictions were viewed as a major asset rather than a badge of untrustworthiness and cause for suspicion.

But I was getting old, and leaping bank-counters and jumping into getaway motors is a young man’s game. I was lucky I had survived so long; many of the lads who started out at the same time as me were not. Those not shot to death in a police ambush or murdered by fellow criminals were doing endless prison sentences or nursing murderous drug habits that turned them into drooling husks. When I set out on my life of crime, ‘going on the pavement and having a parcel of rocks’ meant robbing a jeweller in transit; now it means living in a cardboard box and scoring a bit of crack. Today’s breed of robbers is liable to shoot you for the fun of it, and it may sound strange coming from someone who has made a living from violence, but that was never my way. I followed the unwritten criminal code of honour that used to exist among thieves and blaggers.

Freddy Foreman, south London gangland legend and friend of the Krays, dedicated his book, Respect, to ‘… that almost mythical group of criminals known simply as the Chaps’. The Chaps belong to an era that is now past, and my generation of robbers was the last of the Chaps. We conducted our business according to a code that was handed down to us from former generations of infamous criminals, both real and fictional. The code was rarely spoken about; it was something you learned from observing others in the life and watching westerns and old gangster films. The code meant you did not have to be ashamed of being a criminal, as long as you were the right criminal. It gave us a sense of honour and righteousness in the face of society’s condemnation. We absorbed the code by osmosis and did our best to live within it.

Rule one was Never grass. You learn early on that informing or giving evidence against others is unacceptable among the criminal fraternity and the punishment for it can be very harsh. At worst you can be killed for breaching this rule, and many have been. The average punishment for a grass is a severe beating and a striping. Striping is cutting someone across the face, usually in a curving line that stretches from the corner of the mouth to the earlobe. This kind of scar is also called a ‘telephone’ and indicates that the recipient has been talking to someone who is definitely non grata in criminal circles. Even if not physically marked, a grass will still be branded for life if a whisper of his activities gets out. Though rumours are usually not enough evidence to earn a striping, they are enough to get you ostracized, and that can be worse. In order to ‘work’ as a criminal, you need the cooperation and trust of other criminals, which is why face and reputation are so important in that world. Access to information, bent documentation, firearms and getaway drivers are just some of the things you can usually get only through the criminal network, and if you are not trusted by the fraternity, then you might as well give up crime and get a job on a building site.

The world of the professional career criminal is a small one. Of the 72,000 prisoners who presently inhabit UK jails, less than 5,000 of them could be classed as professional career criminals, that is, people who make a living from crime through choice and not necessity. And these men (for they are predominantly men) class themselves as the elite of the criminal world. They do not cosh OAPs for their pension money or burgle council houses for the video and the contents of the gas-meter or sexually abuse women and children, and they are just as disgusted and angry as you are when they read of such things in the newspapers. For the professional, crime is not personal, it is just a job, and they do not set out to deliberately harm or injure innocent members of the public. But if a security guard has to take one in the leg, or a bank cashier has to have the shit scared out of her in order to claim the prize, then that is unfortunate but all part of the game. The professional criminal is normally a lot less brutal than the amateur and will only use violence as a last resort, because he has worked out beforehand just how far he is willing to go. And he knows that if he gets caught, it will be a jury of straight-goers who decides his fate. Whereas the average straight-goer might have a bit of sympathy or even a sneaking admiration for the criminal who takes on a bank and uses minimal violence, they will almost certainly not be so predisposed towards a toe-rag who coshes everyone in sight to nick a bit of pension money When the public confesses to a ‘fear of crime’, it is not bank robbers and underworld heavies who are high on their fright-list, but the petty little violent and mindless amateurs who intrude on their everyday lives.

So, yes, there is a class-system of sorts even in the criminal world, and the criminal code is part of what divides us. Our code allows us the luxury of elevating our lives and deeds above those of the ‘common’ criminal and invests us with a special status. In reality, the criminal code is no more than an eclectic mix of moral etiquette borrowed from such diverse sources as the Knights of the Round Table, the Japanese code of Bushido, Hollywood westerns and the British stiff-upper-lip set, among many others. Never leave a friend in dire straits, nor show cowardice when confronted by the enemy, nor persist in violence against those weaker than yourself; and comport yourself with honour and dignity at all times. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that.

Of course, the Criminal Justice System acknowledges our elite status in not so subtle ways; they set up special squads like the NCS (National Crime Squad), the RCS (Regional Crime Squad) and the Flying Squad to dedicate their working lives to our activities. And when we are captured, they set us apart in special units and prisons and class us as Category A prisoners. We are given armed-police escorts every time we go to trial and the Home Office has a department that deals only in our every word and move. All of this – the criminal code, the special treatment –only serves to reinforce our high opinion of ourselves.

But today’s young criminals are not interested in concepts like honour, staunchness and reputation. They think nothing of shooting a young girl in the face for a £50 mobile phone or of beating a disabled pensioner half to death for the contents of her purse. Where my generation of criminals took as our role models men like Robin Hood, Dick Turpin and Jesse James (or rather the Hollywood interpretation of them), the latest crop of career criminals tries to emulate the unthinking violence of Jamaican Yardies, Colombian drug-barons and American street-gangs. A short and brutal life is the ‘in’ thing, and it’s not what you nick any more, it’s how many people you can kill or maim while you’re doing it. I don’t understand the mentality of it because, to me, logic dictates that if you have a loaded gun and are ruthless and determined enough to use it to get money, then why not hold up a security van and walk away with a bag of cash rather than shooting a middle-aged woman in the back for a five-grand watch that you’ll only be able to sell for a couple of hundred quid? It doesn’t make any sense. I can only conclude that today’s criminals have no morals, no honour and are as thick as shit. And why they are like that is anyone’s theory. Too much violence in films and television? Single-parent families? Growing up in a consumer-oriented society under successive governments which advocate greedy capitalism as the norm? Too much fluoride in the water or too little seratonin in the brain? The abundance of hard drugs? Natural progression? Take your pick.

I’m glad I’m getting out while I can. In criminal parlance, I am what is known as a ‘rusty gun’; the criminal life and the endless pursuit of the prize have lost their tawdry lustre for me. I have been thoroughly disabused of the notion that armed robbery is a victimless and noble occupation, and I sometimes wonder how I ever arrived at that preposterous supposition in the first place.

In the aftermath of that robbery on London Road, the seeds of doubt were sown. There was no miracle overnight conversion; I carried on committing robberies and frightening the life out of innocent people – but the enthusiasm was no longer there. Things ran their course and I found myself facing the hibernation years once again. And now I sit here in my ‘special’ top-security cell, and I cannot help but wonder what I might have done with my life if I had not donated it to crime and punishment. I am not a monster, but I have done some monstrous things along the way. I’ve made some terrible choices and some plain-stupid decisions. I did what I felt I had to do at the time and not in a shy way.

Porridge-style

So, there you have it. I do not claim to be ‘The Guv’nor’, ‘The Godfather’ or ‘The Colonel’ of some mythical underworld where OAPs are always safe on the streets and where criminals only kill and torture ‘our own’. I am quite sure you’ve heard all that before, and there are only so many ways you can say,’… and then I shot George Cornell right in the ‘ead’, before it all starts wearing a bit thin. I was not some crime ‘kingpin’ who spent my time hobnobbing with B-list celebrities and getting my photograph taken while waiting for my underlings to bring me the loot. I was out there, at the sharp end, nicking the loot myself. I took the rewards, and I took the punishments, and I ain’t crying about none of it. I’m just telling it how it was.

I’m not ‘one of the ones that got away’ from the Train Job. Nor was I one of the Krays’ numerous and varied ‘right-hand men’. I have no inkling as to who killed Freddie Mills or the whereabouts of the mortal remains of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, Frank ‘The Mad Axe-Man’ Mitchell or ‘Ginger’ Marks. As far as I know, they could all be running a jellied-eel stall down the Old Kent Road with ‘Lucky’ Lucan supplying the winkles and Shergar pulling the cart. But I do have a story to tell.

To read my story you do not need to have fought, robbed and swaggered your way through the mean streets of London and into courtrooms and top-security prison cells; I’ve done all that for you. So, welcome to my world. Come in and stay a while. And when the gunsmoke clears and the last gate is slammed, you’ll be glad you can just walk away.