As Harris was recovering from the treatment and getting dressed, Charlie pinned his left foot to the floor with a knife. In court, Harris removed his shoe to show the two scars on his foot. ‘The knife went in there and came out there,’ said Harris. The next ten minutes of court time was devoted to looking at the man’s foot. First, the judge inspected it, then the members of the jury filed past it, in pairs. Finally, the foot was surrounded by the barristers on both sides of the trial, Crown and defence – never before, or since, has the foot of a person been the subject of such intense legal scrutiny.
All in all, Harris told the stunned court that his torture lasted for six hours, after which Charlie apologised and gave him the money he had come for – £150 in cash.
While the Krays were willing to murder to maintain order or settle a grudge, the Richardsons seemed to like torture and were never convicted of murder. True, some of their victims did disappear and police were unable to locate them, but no charges were ever brought. ‘Edward Richardson punched me in the face,’ said petty criminal, Jack Duval, a member of the Richardson gang, who had been pressed into the nylon-importing scam by threats. ‘Then, when I fell down, I was beaten with golf clubs. When I asked what I had done to deserve that, I was told, “You just do as Charlie tells you.”’
On one occasion, a collector of ‘pensions’ (protection money from pub landlords and others), who was twice warned by the brothers after he pocketed the money and spent it at Catford dog track, was nailed to the floor of a warehouse near Tower Bridge for nearly two days, during which time gang members frequently urinated on him.
Another notable character in the Richardson gang was James Alfred ‘Jimmy’ Moody, a gangster and hitman whose career spanned more than four decades and included run-ins with Jack Spot, who is mentioned in the Krays’ chapter.
At one time, Moody was the number-one enforcer for the Richardson brothers, did freelance work for the Krays, and he became one of the most feared criminals to emerge from the London underworld – all before he reached the age of 30. In the 1970s, he joined a team of criminals to form ‘The Chainsaw Gang’, who went on to become that decade’s most successful armed robbers.
Moody seemed to live up to his surname very well, for, as soon he fell in with a gang, he fell out, and he changed allegiances at the drop of a hat.
In 1979, he was imprisoned for murder and armed robbery. While in Brixton Prison, his cell mate was Gerard Tuite, a staunch and senior member of the Provos – the provisional IRA. In 1980, during the hunger strike in the winter of that year, the two men escaped and went on the run – the resourceful Moody was never recaptured.
The escape was audacity itself. Tuite, Moody and another inmate tunnelled through walls of their cells in the top-security remand wing, dropped into a yard where they used builders’ planks and scaffolding piled up for repairs to scale the 15ft perimeter wall. Today, Gerry, now in his mid-fifties, is a very successful businessman in south Cavan and the north Meath region.
While in hiding, Tuite indoctrinated Moody with stories of brutality and torture inflicted on the Irish by the British and convinced him to join the IRA.
To put a little perspective into the relationship Moody enjoyed with the Richardsons, and the clout they must have had, it is worth noting that Moody didn’t mix with just anybody. Gerard Tuite, for example, at 26, had made Irish history in 1982 by becoming the first Irish citizen charged with an offence committed in another country, and he made world headlines. His prosecution in his asylum state, Ireland, for offences committed elsewhere was a landmark in international law governing political crimes.
In 1978, using the nom de guerre David Coyne, he had moved into a girlfriend’s flat in 144 Trafalgar Road, Greenwich. Before the end of the year, he was found guilty of possession of explosives with intent to endanger life. A sawn-off shotgun and an Armalite rifle were also found in the flat. These and other items, including car keys and voice recordings, linked him to various bombings, as well as the targeting of senior British Conservative and royal figures. It is claimed that he was linked with, or involved, in no less than 18 bombing attacks in five British cities with Patrick Magee, the Brighton Bomber, alone.
Soon, Moody’s murderous skills were being put to use as he became the Provo’s secret deadly assassin – a man who struck so much fear into Northern Ireland’s security services that the Thatcher Government put a three-man SAS hit squad on his tail in the mid-1980s.
By the late 1980s, Moody realised he was in danger of overstaying his welcome in Ireland and, inevitably, the lure of the East End persuaded him to return home. He believed that his reputation as a hired killer would keep him one step ahead of trouble, and the law, but he had lost his edge and the London he returned to was a very different place. Huge drug deals, mainly involving Ecstasy and cocaine, rather than armed robbery, were financing many criminals’ lavish lifestyles. The stakes were far higher than ‘the old days’, and so were the profits.
By the early 1990s, Moody’s list of enemies read like a Who’s Who of criminals from both sides of the water. Then there were the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British security services to deal with, making it only a matter of time before he was murdered in 1993.
Another ‘associate’ of Moody’s and, by extension, the Richardsons and the Krays, was gangster and criminal mastermind William ‘Billy’ Hill. From a London family, Hill started his career as a burglar in the late 1920s, then graduated to ‘smash-and-grab’ raids, targeting jewellers and furriers in the 1930s. During World War II, and now in his late twenties, he moved into the black market, specialising in food, diesel and petrol. Another of his specialities was the supply of forged documents to deserting servicemen and, with Jack Spot, running lucrative protection rackets. The two men soon became deadly rivals.
Towards the end of the 1940s, he was charged with burgling a warehouse and fled to South Africa, where he immediately took over illegal activities at several Johannesburg nightclubs. Hill came to the attention of the local police following an assault. He was extradicted to Britain, where he was convicted for the warehouse robbery and served a prison term.
Upon his release, Hill appeared – at least to law-abiding citizens – to have turned over a new leaf. He opened several legitimate nightclubs, which were, in fact, fronts for his expanding criminal activities that included bookmaking and loan sharking. In 1952, he robbed a post office van, netting £250,000, and also ran a cigarette smuggling operation from Morocco.
Towards the end of the 1950s, Hill retired from active involvement in criminal enterprises, preferring to bankroll other gangsters. With his enforcer, Albert ‘Italian Al’ Dimes, he continued to run his nightclubs, including one in the fashionable Sunningdale area of Surrey, into the 1970s. He died of natural causes, a very wealthy man in 1984, aged 73.
In 1966, it was Dimes, fronting Hill, who helped arrange a conference between the New York mafiosi and the Corsican Francisi brothers regarding investing in London casinos. An associate of Charlie Richardson’s, Dimes’ formidable presence in Soho delayed the Kray twins from moving into the area for several years.
If anything, the Richardsons were probably ‘better connected’ to the London underworld than the Krays, and another of their sidekicks was the notorious Frankie Fraser. ‘Mad Frankie’ first met the Richardsons in the early 1960s. Together, they set up the Atlantic Machines fruit machine enterprise.
In 1966, Fraser was charged with the murder of Richard Hart, an associate of the Krays, while others, including Jimmy Moody, were charged with affray. The only witness to this murder who dared give evidence soon changed his mind. Nevertheless, Fraser served five years for affray.
Fraser was also implicated in the 1967 ‘Torture Trial’. Fraser himself was accused of pulling out the teeth of victims with a pair of pliers. He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; indeed, he spent a total of 42 years behind bars in over 20 different UK prisons. And these sentences were often tainted by violence. He was involved in
riots and frequently fought with prison officers and inmates. When the mood took him, he would even take a swing at various prison governors. His richly embroidered criminal CV includes being one of the ringleaders of the Parkhurst Prison Riot in 1969, after which he spent the following six weeks recovering from his injuries in hospital.
An ‘old-school’ type of villain, when he was released from prison in 1985, he was met by his son in a Rolls-Royce. In 1991, ‘Mad Frankie’ was shot in the head at almost point-blank range in an apparent murder attempt outside Turnmills Club on the Clerkenwell Road, London. He has always maintained that a policeman was responsible.
At the time of writing, Frankie is well into his eighties. He appears frequently on TV shows such as Operation Good Guys and Brass Eye. In 1999, he appeared at the Jermyn Street Theatre in a one-man show, An Evening with Mad Frankie Fraser, directed by Patrick Newley, which subsequently toured the UK. More recently, he was giving gangland tours around London, where he points out infamous locations, including The Blind Beggar pub where Ronnie Kray shot dead George Cornell.
For those wishing to explore Frankie’s life and times even further, his website is well worth a visit: www.madfrankiefraser.co.uk.
It would take a task force of 100 Scotland Yard detectives finally to bring the Richardson brothers to justice, and the leading detective said that the hardest part was finding witnesses willing to talk, but the brothers were not prepared to give up without a fight. During their trial at the Old Bailey, every juror was ‘contacted’ and threatened with bodily harm if the gang was convicted. Rather than risk a mis-trial, the Yard set up a special telephone number for the jurors to use if they were threatened again, but the judge aggravated the situation by foolishly telling them that it had probably only been a crank who had made the calls since all of the Richardson mob had been locked up for months.
Despite the threats, hopes were high for a conviction, and the tone was set by Mr Sebag Shaw QC for the Crown, who said, ‘These men are evil… and I can prove them to be so.’
The weather over central London was changeable for this early April morning. It was rather cloudy with sunny intervals, scattered showers and moderate north-westerly winds. And if the Meteorological Office had decreed that the temperature was a little below normal for the time of year, the police were reaching boiling point until the moment the Richardson gang had finally stepped into the dock… and Charlie Richardson was similarly wound up. For years, he had ensured silence through intimidation and torture, and the criminal empire he had built in the densely-packed tenement and high-rise housing estate areas of London, that stretches south from the Thames, was, he thought, impregnable.
The chubby-faced man, his jet-black hair swept back with Brylcream, had already seen the charge sheet, on which he was described as a ‘company director’. And it smarted, for the evidence would show that his ‘company’ consisted of a motley collection of ‘executives’ who made their profits from shady deals, and whose ‘labour relations’ were based upon the theory that dissident employees, or business associates, were best kept in line by facing kangaroo courts and being punished for the smallest infraction by being stripped naked and given electric shock treatment, or worse.
Charlie Richardson considered himself to be a kind of latter-day Al Capone, as he stepped into the dock wearing a £50 suit. He thought of his ‘patch’ as a scaled-down version of Chicago during the Prohibition era, and his arrogant demeanour was reinforced by the deliberately careless manner in which he bore his stocky, boxerlike frame. When the charges were put to him, he sneered and snapped out, ‘Not guilty!’
Rising to his feet, Sebag Shaw QC – the man who had defended Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK – picked up a document, turned to the jury and, in a measured tone, said, ‘Charles Richardson was the dominant leader of a somewhat disreputable business fraternity who operated through a number of phoney companies.’
Richardson glared at his adversary.
‘But,’ said Sebag Shaw, with a theatrical wave of his arm, ‘this case is not about dishonesty or fraud… it is about violence and threats of violence.’
There was a pause. The court room stilled as counsel pulled a spotlessly white handkerchief from his pocket, sniffed, blew his nose, returned the handkerchief to his pocket, and resumed, this time more darkly. ‘Not, let me say, casual acts of violence, committed in sudden anger – but vicious and brutal violence systematically inflicted, deliberately and cold-bloodedly and with utter and callous ruthlessness.’
It is often said that advocates are born and not made, and good advocacy depends on good preparation and oral skills. Sebag Shaw was a master of his calling. Later to be knighted, he knew that the hallmark of good preparation and presentation was to know exactly where one is going, what the objective is, and that attention to detail was everything. His preparation for the case had been, as ever, meticulous.
Charlie Richardson was now black with rage. No one had ever insulted him like this upstart wearing a horsehair wig.
Pointing an accusatory finger at the dock, counsel for the Crown continued, ‘Beatings and torture of people who upset Richardson, or who were even suspected of jeopardising his business career, ensured that no one ever complained to the authorities about south London gangsterism. Such methods had succeeded for years until, finally, some of the sufferers had told their disgruntled stories to the police.’
The first of the victims called to give evidence was Jack Duval. Born in Russia in 1919, and a one-time French legionnaire, the 48-year-old acknowledged that he had come to the Old Bailey that day from prison, where he was serving a three-year-sentence for an airline tickets fraud.
Duvall, an inveterate gambler at the Astor Club, off Berkeley Square, where the Richardsons had recruited him, was asked to recall a day in 1960, and he did so nervously and in a manner which suggested that the day in question was the unluckiest day of his life.
Very soon after their first meeting, Duvall was serving his ‘apprenticeship’ as ‘European representative’ for one of the gang’s dodgy companies. The scam was simplicity itself. The well-spoken Duvall would order Italian-made nylon stockings for his London company, have them imported on credit, and not pay the bill. When he failed to perform well, he was summoned back to London and beaten black and blue by his bosses, the Richardsons.
On another occasion, he went to Germany for a few weeks. ‘It was about eight weeks, if I recall,’ said Duvall wistfully. ‘Things did not go as planned and I was recalled… as I entered the Camberwell office, Mr Richardson hit me with his fist, and I still have the mark on the side of my nose from this ring.’
This statement caused everyone in the court to crane their necks to see the scar, but Duval was now so excited he couldn’t keep his head still. ‘When I came to, I found I had been relieved of my watch, ring and wallet containing $200. Mr Richardson was sitting behind his big desk with chairs all around… like a court.’
But Richardson was also interested in another person in the office, a Mr Alfred Blore, manager of Common Market Merchants. He was, in fact, selecting knives from a canteen of cutlery, and throwing them in Blore’s direction – some which were striking him in the arm – with the intention of drawing the terrified man’s attention to his business shortcomings and that he did not want Richardson to take over his company.
According to Duval, Richardson kept repeating to Blore, ‘I’m the fuckin’ boss, and if I tell you what to do, you will do it.’
Blore asked, ‘What have I done, Charlie’? Then he screamed, ‘Don’t do it!’
Other cronies of Richardson’s, minor ‘executives’ of the company, had been lurking on the fringes of the bizarre Camberwell office-cum-court room, and two were ordered to go to Blore’s offices in Cannon Street and ‘collect the stock and books and make it look as if there had been a robbery’. The reason for that, Duvall drily testified, was that by then Mr Blore ‘was covered in blood’, and if any questions were asked it would be said that he had been a
ttacked during the supposed robbery.
Mr Geoffrey Crispin, defending Richardson, suggested that it had been Duval, and not Charles Richardson, who had been the real gang leader. Duval admitted that he lived a life of fraud, involving large sums of money. But he denied that in the fraudulent companies run by the gang he was, as Mr Crispin put it, ‘the guv’nor’.
Duval sharply turned on the lawyer, saying, ‘I have never been the boss. I have worked for Charles Richardson because I had to.’
But, continued Mr Crispin, Duval was hoping to receive a large sum of money by selling his life story to the newspapers.
Duval had a swift answer to that. ‘I am,’ he said haughtily, ‘but at present I am a guest of Her Majesty and cannot indulge in any business activities while I am in prison.’
The next witness to step into the box was 38-year-old Bernard Wajcenberg, a Polish-born businessman, whose dealings with the Richardsons had not been enjoyable. He, it appeared, had sought business ‘references’ about Charlie Richardson from the police, a move which had met with Charlie’s disapproval. At a meeting in the notorious Camberwell office – at which Wajcenberg was ‘so paralysed with fear I could not speak’ – Richardson told him, ‘You have ratted by making enquiries about me to the police. If you don’t pay £5,000, you will not get out of this office alive.’
To add weight to his threat, Richardson showed his terrified victim a cupboard stocked with knives, axes and a shotgun. Hoarsely, the witness told the jury of eleven men and one woman, ‘Richardson grabbed me by the lapels and said, “When I go berserk, you know what happens.”’ Wajcenberg did know and took swift steps to borrow £3,000, which Richardson accepted in payment.
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