Benjamin Coulston also underwent six hours of torture. He was stripped naked, some of his teeth were ripped out with a pair of pliers, lit cigars were stubbed out on his arms and legs, and he was ‘toasted’ on the face and body by a closely-held electric heater. As an end-piece to the session he was bundled into a tarpaulin sheet, along with two 14lb weights and, from inside the shroud, he heard Richardson say, ‘Get rid of him.’
Coulston stared at the jury with sad eyes. ‘I thought I was going to be dumped in the river,’ he said in an almost inaudible voice. ‘And all the time this was happening, Richardson and the others were drinking, laughing, smoking and enjoying the fun.’ But lucky for him, Richardson wearied of the episode once the victim’s terror had been savoured and ordered his release.
‘He gave me a new shirt,’ said Coulston, ‘and his brother, Edward, drove me home.’
Other victims came to the witness box to recount similar experiences in the firm’s office and warehouse. One man, who had been beaten and burned and had his toes broken, heard the screams of another sufferer as he lay in a hole, beneath a trap door, into which he had been thrown when his tormentors had finished with him.
The highlight of the trial came on the morning on which Richardson himself finally entered the witness box to tell his own story. His line was that all of the evidence against him was a pack of lies. Duval’s ‘story’ was an example, and he blandly told the jury, ‘It is something out of a storybook and never happened at any time. It is a ridiculous allegation that I should beat him up just to do what I told him to.’
‘Have you ever attacked anyone?’ he was asked.
Richardson looked around the courtroom with a smile of a man who would endeavour, patiently, to answer all nonsensical questions. Of course he had never attacked anyone. ‘Never had a cross word,’ he declared. ‘There are a lot of clever fraudsters putting these allegations and getting out of their own frauds by blaming me for these incidents.’
On the table in the well of the court stood the electric generator said to have been the principal torture machine. But Richardson eyed it as though it were some totally mysterious piece of equipment. ‘That’s the only one of those I’ve ever seen,’ he insisted as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. ‘I’ve never owned one, and I don’t know anyone who has.’ He looked at the machine again. ‘It’s a conspiracy,’ he said. ‘It’s a tissue of lies. These people have ganged up against me.’
One moment of humour came when prosecuting counsel, seeking information about a potential witness whom the police were unable to trace, asked Richardson, ‘Is this man alive and well?’
With mock exasperation, the accused man retorted, ‘You keep asking me all the time if people are alive and well, and I object to it. It has a very serious inference.’
Richardson was followed into the stand by his henchman Roy Hall, who was alleged to have operated the electric generator. But, like his boss, he firmly declared that he had never before seen such a machine. What was more, he added, ‘I have never seen Harris and Coulston in my life before the magistrates’ court. I am an innocent, hard-working man. The prosecution witnesses have tried to frame me.’
The jury witnessed a parade of other gang members alleged to have acted as assistants to the chief torturer. One was the man said to have attempted to draw a victim’s teeth with pliers, and who succeeded only in tearing the man’s gums. Again, he had done nothing, seen nothing, knew nobody. On the day that the loudest screams were being enjoyed by the scampi-eating gang – and the electric generator was pumping out its agonising stream of current – he was busy putting flowers on the grave of his wife’s father.
For the Crown, Mr Sebag Shaw summed up this, and similar defence evidence, as ‘poppycock produced in the hope of creating a smokescreen through which you, members of the jury, would not be able to see. But this trial is concerned with matters of the gravest import to society. If the charges made out are well founded, it reveals a canker in our midst which, if unchecked, would undermine the civilised society in which we live.’ Of Richardson, he said, ‘He was the man of power who could get things done and who could succeed by his methods where other methods failed.’
But it was on the 38th day of the trial – the longest trial so far in British criminal history – that an important and significant announcement came from the judge. He had been informed, he said, that threats had been to members of the jury that ‘there had better be a disagreement in the Richardson case’. One threat had been hastily whispered to a juror’s 75-year-old mother as she waited at a bus stop. Similar ‘warnings’ had been given to other jurors by telephone.
Mr Justice Lawton, careful to preserve the fair-trial rights of the prisoners, told the jury, ‘Whatever has happened must have been done without the co-operation of the defendants, most of whom have been in custody since last July.
‘But, unfortunately, whenever there is a trial of this kind, it attracts publicity, and there are busybodies, evil-wishers, misguided acquaintances and friends who will interfere. When they do interfere there is a danger that a jury might take the view that what did happen came about as the result of the intervention of the defendants. Now that I have pointed the position out to you I am confident that no such view will be taken by you.’
All the same, the judge went on, a special police telephone post had been set up with a secret number for jurors to ring immediately, at any hour, if they were approached again. ‘A police patrol car will be on the scene within a few minutes,’ Mr Justice Lawton said.
The judge repeated his concern over the issue in his detailed summing up of the trial. There was ‘not a scrap of evidence’, he warned, that Richardson and his fellow defendants had been parties to the jury threats, and the jurors must put the matter out of their minds in reaching their verdicts. He reminded the jury of the importance of reaching a unanimous decision. ‘If you cannot agree, there will have to be a new trial,’ he told them. ‘Just think what that will mean.’
Mr Justice Lawton spent three days on his summing-up – one of the longest addresses ever made from the bench – and, on 7 June, the jurors retired for 9 hours and 26 minutes. As they finally filed back into court, many of them showing signs of fatigue, the eight men in the dock stared anxiously at them. The list of charges was long, and it took time for the foreman to deliver the several verdicts. Richardson and five other gang members were found guilty of some – although not all – of the charges against them.
Richardson, pronounced guilty on nine counts, told the judge, ‘I am completely innocent of these charges.’ But he and the rest still had to wait before hearing their sentences, and they were stiff. Mr Justice Lawton said he would hand down verdicts the following day. Meanwhile, he discharged the jury ‘from your long, wearisome and worrying time’, but added, ‘You are not concerned with sentencing, but having regard to your long connection with the case you might like to be in court tomorrow.’
As was to be expected, the jury accepted the judge’s invitation and were back at the Old Bailey the next morning to hear the sentences. Charles Richardson was handed a 25-year term of imprisonment. Mr Justice Lawton told a still cocky Richardson, ‘I have come to the conclusion that no known penal system will cure you by time. The only thing that will cure you is the passing of years.’ The judge added, ‘I am satisfied that over a period of years you were the leader of a large gang, a disciplined, well led, well-organised gang, and that for purposes of your own material interests, and on occasions for purposes of your criminal desires, you terrorised those who crossed your path, terrorised them in a way that was vicious, sadistic and a disgrace to society. When I remember some of the evidence of your brutality, I am ashamed to think that one lives in a society that contains men like you. It must be clear to all those who set themselves up as gang leaders that they will be struck down by the law as you are struck down.’
Charlie Richardson stared, tight-lipped, at the judge as the sentence was delivered. Then, as three burly police officers formed
a guard around him to take him to the cells below the court room, he turned to the jury and snarled, ‘Thank you… very much!’
Sentences ranging from eight to ten years were given to the other guilty defendants. Eddie Richardson, Charlie’s younger brother, collected one of the ten-year sentences, which was to follow the five years he was currently serving for other offences.
It was the end of the notorious Richardson gang, and it had been achieved through the concentrated efforts of a team of 100 dedicated police officers. As his last duty in the trial, the judge called before him the dozen senior detectives of the team – including young, blonde WPC Gillian Hoptroff. Mr Justice Lawton told the team, ‘I want to thank all of you on behalf of the court – and I think I am speaking on behalf of every law-abiding citizen in this country – for the work you have done in breaking up one of the most dangerous gangs I have ever heard of. Well done.’
So how did the Richardson brothers stack up against the Krays and the Gunns? The description of ‘a pair of bullying hoodlums’ springs to mind, and they were not exactly financially successful in any event. Most certainly, Charlie Richardson was psychopathic, in much the same way as Ronnie Kray. Unlike the Krays, though, they ran their ‘empire’ from several rundown locations, and could never have aspired to managing a flashy nightclub, or mixing with the rich and famous. In a nutshell, and although they came from a better social background than the Gunns and Krays, the Richardsons, like the Gunns, had no class.
When comparing the particular qualities of the gangs, many would say that the Richardsons clearly left the Gunns in their wake… or did they? It might be fair to say that the Gunns also managed their shady businesses from shady locations – a couple of council houses on an equally rundown estate. The Krays, Gunns and Richardsons ran their gangs using the threat of violence, which they would visit on anyone who crossed them; however, there seems little doubt that the Gunn brothers were financially more successful and, unlike the Richardsons, yet so like the Krays, they were quick to enforce their own particular discipline by the use of firearms. The Richardsons were never charged with murder, although it does seem likely that they may have ordered at least one execution, but this was never proven.
And how has crime literature treated the Richardsons? They have gone down in gangland history wearing the label ‘The Torture Gang’ hanging around their necks. Apart from that, they are distinguished by little else, except, maybe, that they were arch-enemies of the Kray twins, but at least they are well-known to aficionados of gangland buffs. It is highly unlikely that the Gunns will be afforded such well-publicised infamy, for overshadowing them for all time will be the Krays, and their instantly recognisable ‘Firm’.
One area of common ground, one that the three pairs of brothers shared, was criminal empire-building based on shifting sands. The only glue that held them together was the loyalty they expected, and demanded, of their foot soldiers, and this proved to be their undoing. Of course, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and, as soon as the police targeted the Richardson gang, it was only a matter of time before their house of cards came crashing down. Like the Krays, and the Gunns, informers and victims turned against them and the law took its inevitable course.
6
Thomas ‘Tam’ McGraw and the Scottish Gangs
‘McGraw became one of the most powerful gangsters in Britain, certainly in Glasgow, and he earned a great deal of that power by trading information with the police.’
AUTHOR REG MCKAY
The ‘Penny Mobs’ was a name used by the press to describe the early street gangs in Glasgow during the early 1870s. Local kids were fined a penny if they stepped out of line, then released back on to the streets. The Penny Mobs, like their New York City counterparts, were among the many gangs which formed following a large-scale migration of Irish immigrants fleeing Ireland during the potato famines of the 1840s and 1850s. One of these gangs, the Ribbon Men, were reported to have blown up a gasometer in Tradeston in 1833.
In Scotland and Ireland, the name Penny Mobs still lived on through to the twentieth century, a period that gave rise to prominent gangs such as the Tongs, the Toils, the Govans, the Powery Gang, the Soo Spiders, the Billy Boys, the Norman Conks, the Rednecks, the Baltic Fleet, the Black Diamond Gang, the Black Hands, the Nudes, the Ruchill Boys and the Monks.
Glasgow was known as the ‘second city of the Empire’ and everything was covered in a fine layer of black soot. For their part, the Billy Boys had 800 members at its height during the 1920s and 1930s, then a time when Oswald Mosely’s British Facists started a Glasgow branch of the Ku Klux Klan.
Today, the gangs are still around, now populated by Neds, Chavs, Chags, Kevs, Scallies, Spides or White Trash – a very eloquent lot who have their own vernacular that produces some of the ‘finest poetry’ in the world: ‘Ode to me Ma… Slashin’ jaws, lickin’ baws, punin’ jellies, and stabbin’ bellies.’ Wordsworth, it’s not, but there’s a certain street dynamism about it that can’t be denied.
The Glasgow district of Barlanark was developed in response to the city’s post-war housing need – over 2,300 four- and five-apartment tenements characterised by brick balconies, at that time under local council control. And almost from the day the first families moved in, the place became a breeding ground for crime, the area becoming steeped in violence and gang culture.
Perhaps the most infamous of these gangs was the BAR-L Team, made up of members from Barlanark and the surrounding areas, and one of the toughest was Tam ‘The Licensee’ McGraw. Barlanark was to become part of the bloody Glasgow Ice Cream Wars of the 1980s.
Tam McGraw owned the Caravel public house on Hallhill Road, and it was a well-known meeting place for Glasgow underworld figures. Apart from general revelry, the place that also saw more than its fair share of violence and was subject to drive-by shootings as well as grenades being thrown through the windows. In 1991, the pub was burned to the ground following the alleged retribution murder, in September 1991, of Bobby Glover and Joe ‘Bananas’ Hanlon, by the crime lord Arthur ‘The Godfather’ Thompson for the killing of his son, Arthur ‘Fat Boy’ Thompson Jr.
Paul Ferris was charged with the murder of Fat Boy and later acquitted. He maintained his innocence throughout and said that the murder had been carried out by a hitman known as ‘The Apprentice’.
In 1998, Ferris was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment at the Old Bailey for gun-running. He had started out as an enforcer for Arthur Thompson Sr, and he went on to become of the most feared hard men in Glasgow. Aged 38, he was released from Frankland Prison after serving four years and says he wants to use his experiences to write crime fiction books which ‘will be more realistic than those currently on offer.’
Thompson Sr was one of the biggest players in Scottish crime history. For years, he had been targeted by the National Crime Intelligence Service, the National Crime Squad and MI5, who knew that he worked with the larger London mobs and sold guns to Loyalist groups in Ireland.
Thomas ‘The Licensee’ McGraw was born in 1953 in the East End of Glasgow. A product of the ghetto-like housing schemes of Glasgow’s inner-city, he took to thieving at an early age like a duck to water. Most of the kids in the area did; how else could deprived 12-year-olds get hold of little luxuries in life like cigarettes or a night at the flicks? They turned their hands to shoplifting, housebreaking and pinching anything that wasn’t nailed down to earn a few quid.
As a young man, having spent time in approved schools and Borstals, McGraw moved to London with his young wife. Here, he survived a horrific factory accident and, with the compensation, the couple returned to Glasgow and bought into the lucrative ice cream business. But it wasn’t long before the McGraws became involved in the ice cream wars, in which rival firms used guns and violence to seize control of the trade plied among the huge housing schemes.
The ice cream war conflicts were characterised by rival ice cream vendors raiding one another’s vans and firing shotguns through windscreens. Su
perficially, the violence appeared disproportionate and, at times, the situation seemed farcical, with police officers from Strathclyde detailed to follow ice cream vans around on their runs, causing the locals to nickname them ‘The Serious Chimes Squad’. But the profits to be had from merely selling ice cream were minimal, as most of the vans also peddled stolen property and drugs behind the cosy, child-friendly ‘Mr Whippy’ image.
Events culminated in six members of the Doyle family being burned alive in the Ruchazie council housing estate on 16 April 1984 and McGraw was among the suspects arrested. 18-year-old Andrew Doyle, nicknamed Fat Boy, a driver for the Marchetti firm – who owned hundreds of vans throughout the west of Scotland – had resisted being intimidated into distributing drugs on his run, and attempts to take over his route had already led him to be shot a few weeks earlier. Now a further so-called ‘frightener’ was planned against him.
At 2.00am, a fire was started in the cellar of a flat in Bankend Street, Ruchazie, where Fat Boy lived with his family. The door was doused with petrol and set alight and, with the help of car tyres, it spread quickly. The members of the Doyle family, and three visitors who were staying the night, were asleep at the time. They awoke to a flaming ceiling and dense black smoke on all sides. The resultant blaze killed five people, with a sixth dying later in hospital – James Doyle, 53; his daughter Christina Halleron, 25; her 18-month-old son Mark; and three of Mr Doyle’s sons, James, 23, Andrew, 18, and Tony aged 14.
The arson attack caused public outrage in Glasgow, and the Strathclyde Police arrested several people over the following months, eventually charging four of them who were tried and convicted of offences relating to the vendettas. The remaining two, Thomas ‘TC’ Campbell and Joe Steele, were tried for the murders, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, of which they were to serve not less than 20 years according to the judge’s recommendation. Campbell was also separately convicted in the involvement of an earlier shotgun attack.
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