London's Gangs at War

by Dick Kirby

  Andrews went on to repudiate Beach’s suggestion that the police had brought pressure to bear on him, or that the Daily Sketch ‘was keeping him’. When Beach implied that Andrews’ suggestion that he had seen Glinski at Spot’s flat on three occasions was ‘a recent invention’, Andrews countered this by saying, ‘I particularly remember now, he was very kind to the little girl there.’ Since the ‘little girl’ referred to was undoubtedly one of Spot’s daughters, this was something that Beach definitely did not want aired.

  Mrs Smyth, who had identified everybody else leaving Hyde Park Mansions, was absolutely adamant that Glinski was one of them, but Beach saved himself for Sparks and tore into him, stating that all of the spoken conversations he had had with Glinski were untrue, that he had (‘for some reason’) shown favouritism to Dimes and that his actions were motivated by spite. Sparks not only repudiated these suggestions of impropriety but stated that until he had seen Dimes in the wounding case he had never previously spoken to him.

  Beach had seriously annoyed the Clerk of the Court by ignoring his instructions regarding his line of questioning, so no one was particularly surprised that when Glinski was committed for trial at the Old Bailey, he remained in custody. In fact, due to his consistently dodgy behaviour, no one was particularly surprised when, a couple of years later, Beach was charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He was acquitted, and then another twenty years went by before a Disciplinary Tribunal of the Law Society struck him off the Rolls of Solicitors.

  The trial of the four conspirators commenced at the Old Bailey on 28 November with legal heavyweights in attendance, both for the prosecution (led by the Solicitor General, Sir Harry Hylton-Foster QC) and the defence.

  Reggie Seaton, this time junior counsel to his leader, took Andrews through his evidence once more, and once more the villainous old preacher admitted that he had lied his head off at Spot’s trial.

  ‘I was very poor and very hungry’, said Andrews.

  Seaton asked him, ‘How were you off for funds?’

  Andrews replied, ‘I had not got any.’

  ‘How did you manage?’ asked Seaton.

  Andrews sadly replied, ‘That is a mystery to me.’

  The pathetic picture which had been painted of the old scoundrel was only improved when Macdonough’s barrister, Fredman Ashe-Lincoln QC (who was later arrested and fined for possessing a loaded Webley-Scott 7.65mm pistol) asked him, ‘Do you ever tell the truth?’

  ‘I do sometimes.’

  ‘Very rarely, isn’t that so?

  ‘You say so.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think I always pride myself on being an honourable man, which makes it more disgraceful than ever that I should have lied as I did.’

  The relentless cross-examination continued the following day, but it is very difficult to insist that a witness has been telling lies when that person has immersed himself in sackcloth and ashes and agrees with practically everything that’s being said. In fact, cross-examination may badly rebound on the accuser, which happened when Andrews said, ‘I told the most terrible lies on that occasion. It is awful having your sins thrown at you after you have repented of them.’

  David Weitzman QC, representing Goldstein, suggested, ‘You do not believe in repentance, do you?’

  This was fairly unwise, because Andrews riposted with, ‘Even the repentant thief on the cross was pardoned’, adding sorrowfully for effect, ‘I have no pardon.’

  There is a time and a place for everything and also a time for defence counsel to cut their losses, shut up, sit down and, in this case, allow other defence barristers such as Anthony Marlowe QC for Schack to ask Andrews how soon after the Spot trial had he repented. This allowed the impious old rogue to reply, ‘You mean when did I come to my real senses? I cannot tell you the time. Have you never heard of a sudden conversion?’

  But Weitzman did not shut up. He alluded to the suggestion that the Daily Sketch were paying Andrews’ bills and asked if what he had said at the trial was true, this would not have been any use to the newspaper.

  It brought a very snappy intervention from the judge, Mr Justice Ormerod, who knew his stuff, since just over a year later he would be promoted to Lord Justice of Appeal. There was only one suggestion there, the judge told Weitzman: that the Daily Sketch was paying his hotel bill to induce Andrews to fake the evidence he was giving at this trial.

  ‘I’m not suggesting that’, said Weitzman.

  The sixty-five-year-old judge snapped back, ‘I do not care whether you are or not – that is the innuendo.’

  It had been continually put to Andrews that he had been promised that he would not be prosecuted if he gave evidence for the Crown, something which he steadfastly denied, but the matter was finally laid to rest when the Solicitor General asked Sparks, ‘Did you, or anyone in your presence, ever indicate to Mr Andrews that he would not himself be prosecuted?’

  ‘No’, replied Sparks and went on to say that on every occasion that he had spoken to Andrews, his solicitor had been present.

  The judge’s sharpness was not confined to the defence; after it had been pointed out that Sparks had been seen speaking to Andrews – albeit innocently – whilst he was still in the witness box, he was asked not to speak to any police witness between the close of the day’s hearing and the next day. ‘You have heard what has been said’, remarked the judge, adding witheringly, ‘I suppose you realize that is your duty and you will observe it.’

  The remaining police witnesses came in for the usual defence barrister’s savaging: the veracity of the conversations with the accused, the accuracy of the notes in their pocket books, when they were made, who else had been present, and so on.

  When the accused gave evidence, where it was possible to say without contradiction by a third party other than Andrews that they did not know each other and had never gone to Hyde Park Mansions, the Cumberland Hotel or Perkoff’s office, they all did so. One matter that they all agreed upon was that there had never been any offer of money to Andrews (other than ten shillings given him by Rita Comer for a meal or a taxi) and no one had suggested to Andrews that he should give false testimony at Spot’s trial.

  In their closing speeches for the defence, Ashe-Lincoln for Macdonough advised the jury to ‘look carefully and tread warily’, Weitzman for Goldstein said, ‘nothing Andrews said in evidence could be relied upon’, Anthony Marlowe QC, MP for Schack said that because of Spot’s acquittal, ‘it would be a deplorable thing . . . by seeing some of that man’s friends were punished’ and Mr A.P. Marshall QC for Rita Comer said that because Spot had been referred to in the newspapers as a King of the Underworld, ‘I suppose people began to think that his wife must be a sort of queen of the underworld’, which was a rather daring, if not a foot-shooting, comment to make.

  After the judge summed up the evidence, it took the jury just one hour on 7 December to find the four defendants guilty.

  Macdonough had just one minor gambling conviction, as well as owing various bookmakers £134, and he was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. Schack had three previous convictions, having been bound over for being a suspected person in 1931, received a fine of £1 for assaulting a bookmaker in 1939 and also the six months’ sentence imposed on him and Spot for unlawful wounding in 1939; he, too, was sentenced to twelve months. The judge was unaware that Goldstein had been acquitted of the charge for which Schack and Spot had been convicted, but he had three convictions, one in 1938 for unlawful wounding when he was discharged on probation and ordered to pay five guineas costs, plus two more for gaming offences. Nevertheless, the judge told him, ‘I am satisfied that you were the ringleader’ and sentenced him to two years’ imprisonment. Saying, ‘There must be considerable sympathy for her’, the judge fined Rita Comer £50 with the alternative of three months’ imprisonment in default.

  As the defendants dispersed, three to prison, one to the comforting arms of her husband who, on legal advice, had kept w
ell away from the court, so the trial began of Christopher Glinski before the same judge and the same prosecuting counsel. Once more, Andrews was the prime prosecution witness and he repeated that he had seen Glinski on at least three occasions at Hyde Park Mansions, something strenuously repudiated by the defence.

  Asked by Mr W.R. Rees-Davies MP, for Glinski, how it was that he remembered the name of Hyde Park Mansions now, when the previous Monday he had forgotten it, Andrews replied that he had been reminded.

  Rees-Davies was on him like a shot: ‘Who reminded you?’

  To general laughter in court, Andrews humbly replied, ‘I think it was his Lordship.’

  But whilst Rees-Davies dismissed Andrews as ‘a wicked old perjurer and a terrible old rascal’ he had to tread rather more carefully with Mrs Smyth, who had no doubt that she had seen him with the newly convicted conspirators at the Cumberland Hotel. Glinski would later say that he did not possess a sports jacket or windcheater of the kind which Mrs Smyth had described, but was obliged to admit that whilst he was on remand in Brixton prison he had exchanged a brown or fawn suit for the blue one which he was now wearing.

  No such niceties were extended to the police officers, for whom the gloves were now well and truly off. Detective Chief Inspector Jack Mannings, it was suggested, had, with Sparks, told deliberate lies to secure Glinski’s conviction; when Mannings, not unnaturally, disagreed, Rees-Davies told him, ‘I am suggesting you are the person committing perjury and you deliberately took this man under unlawful arrest to West End Central police station’; this brought forth another firm repudiation. Sparks received the same accusations and uttered the same denials.

  In summing up to the jury, the judge mentioned that in the case for the defence there had been no mincing of words. He felt that he could not emphasize too strongly that there was no possibility of a mistake. Either the two officers were speaking the truth or it was a most deliberate lie on their part to manufacture a case against the accused.

  Fifty minutes later, the jury returned, having accepted the latter part of the judge’s comments and found Glinski not guilty; the possessor of what was described as the ‘Polish Military Cross’ (probably the Krzyż Walecznych) and the French Croix de Guerre for wartime service with the RAF, as well as convictions for receiving stolen property and common assault in 1951, tottered from the dock a free man. Three weeks previously, he had also been acquitted of conspiracy to cheat and defraud. Three years later, Glinski sued the police officer who had arrested him on that latter charge and was awarded £2,500 and costs. The police officer appealed against the decision, and in 1962 that judgement was overturned.

  Back in 1955, Spot went off with Rita – they briefly commiserated with a tearful Mrs Schack regarding her husband’s incarceration and she responded with two words to them, the second of which was ‘off’ – and jointly announced their intention to open a small café. Dimes took over Spot’s point-to-point interests. Although the ‘small café’ did not materialize, peace reigned – for just five months. Then things would change, dramatically and horrifically.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Attack outside Hyde Park Mansions

  Billy Hill’s star was in the ascendant; Spot’s was nowhere to be seen. He was a worried man, fearing retribution from the Hill/Dimes camps; but logically speaking, was there any reason for him to worry? Not really. Neither Dimes nor he had been convicted. Albert Dimes and Bert Marsh had got what they wanted, control of the racetracks, and they knew – as Spot did – that there was no one strong enough to wrest it from them. Spot might just as well been dubbed ‘Norman No-Mates’ – he had permitted three men to go to prison and his wife to be convicted on his behalf; no one wanted to back him.

  Billy Hill was satisfied, too: he had his clubs to run and, of course, the two robberies he had set up in 1952 and 1954 meant that he never needed to want for anything again.

  It was therefore the height of foolishness when, just after Christmas 1955, Spot hired hardman Joe Cannon to shoot both Dimes and Hill. Three youngsters were sub-contracted to help, and Spot supplied the guns. What happened thereafter is rather hazy: Cannon claimed that shots were fired, but this is disputed. Another version has it that the youngsters boasted about what they were supposed to do and word got out; they were then suitably ‘spoken to’, the guns were returned to Spot and that was the end of the matter, at least as far as Spot was concerned.

  But it was not the end for Dimes, and certainly not for Hill. Spot had thrown down the gauntlet, the word was on the streets about what he had planned and if he could get away unpunished then rival gangs would see it as a very definite sign of weakness on the part of Messrs Dimes and Hill.

  So whilst Spot’s fears might have been illogical previously, now he had real concerns. Whereas nine years previously Peter Beveridge, the head of No. 2 District’s CID, had summoned him regarding the proposed confrontation with the White faction, now it was Spot who went, cap in hand, to see Beveridge and plead for protection. But in fairness, in the absence of any credible evidence there was nothing Beveridge could do – Spot could not really admit to planning the murder of Hill and Dimes – and as the early months of 1956 went by, Spot grew more and more apprehensive, with good reason.

  During the evening of 2 May, Spot and Rita were returning to their flat at Hyde Park Mansions with a friend, Paddy Carney, when cars screeched to a halt and a number of men – the figures are vague, but there might have been a dozen or more – leapt out and attacked them.

  ‘I screamed’, said Rita later, ‘and my husband pushed me against the railings and got in front of me. Someone pushed me down, trying to get at my husband. They started whacking him. One had a shillelagh and another had a big instrument; I don’t know if it was a cosh.’

  There was indeed a cosh; in addition, there was a shillelagh, which Rita later identified as the one she had given to Billy Hill, a present from Ireland. There was also an iron bar, a knife and a razor as this band of heroes, kicking, punching, beating and slashing, tore into Spot, cutting his face wide open; Rita, too, was punched and bruised, receiving a blow to the shoulder from the shillelagh.

  It required the expertise of Dr Robin S.B. Ling at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington to insert seventy-eight stitches into Spot’s face and left hand, an awful lot of bandages to hold his body together and a transfusion of two pints of blood, half a pint of blood plasma and a pint of plasma substitute; and now, Spot named names to the police.

  He made two statements. In the first he said, ‘Among others who were setting about me were Billy Hill, Albert Dimes, Bobby Warren, Falco and Frankie Fraser . . . these are the people I can remember.’

  In the second statement he said, ‘The man who cut me with the knife was the man I know as Frankie Fraser, he cut me on the face. I am prepared to give evidence against them. Bobby Warren struck me on the head with a piece of iron. All these men are known to me.’

  Rita, too, provided the police with a catalogue of the attackers.

  Hill and Dimes were brought in and both were unconcerned; their respective alibis appeared copper-bottomed and watertight, and although Hill was detained for seven hours, they were both released without charge. The same applied to ‘Big Tommy’ Falco, an associate of Hill’s and a driver for Albert Dimes who had been shot at when he visited a racetrack; there was insufficient evidence to charge him and he, too, was released. A little later, there was what purported to be an attack on Falco in the most mysterious circumstances, of which more later.

  The first of the gang to be arrested and charged was Robert Warren, aged twenty-eight, on 4 May. There was certainly bad blood between him and Spot: in 1947 Spot had given Warren’s brother Johnny a ferocious beating. This in turn had led to another mob-handed confrontation, which resulted in a villain named Billy Goller getting his throat cut (one of the participants was Johnnie Carter – he appears later in the book); since it seemed likely that Goller would expire, this caused some concern amongst the combatants. Luckily, a soothing poultice of £
300 was applied to the incision and peace reigned once more.

  Warren was asked to participate in an identification parade, did so and was promptly picked out by Rita Spot. At Marylebone Magistrates’ Court Detective Superintendent John ‘Jock’ McIver, the former schoolmaster from the Highlands requested (‘in his thin, piping voice’, according to Nipper Read) a remand in custody from the magistrate, Mr Walter Frampton, and got one.

  McIver, meanwhile, put the word about that ‘the heat was off’ and that in any event Francis Davidson Fraser was not among the people he was looking for. This worked. In the first instance, Fraser had gone to Brighton; he later moved to Ireland, where Hill had rented a house for him. When Hill erroneously told Fraser it would be safe for him to return, he did so; however, as Fraser stepped off the plane at Heathrow, there was a reception committee waiting for him which, according to ‘Nipper’ Read, he acknowledged with ‘a look of fury on his face’.

  Thirty-two-year-old Fraser never looked very happy unless he was hurting someone; at that time he had fifteen previous convictions, several of them for violence, including a razor-slashing and attacking a man with a broken bottle, and had twice been certified as insane – hence his soubriquet ‘Mad Frankie’.

  He was identified by Rita Comer as one of her husband’s attackers at an identification parade held at Paddington police station on 12 May, and when he appeared before Mr Geoffrey Raphael, at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court on 14 May he was remanded in custody after Superintendent McIver told the court that when charged, Fraser had replied, ‘I am entirely innocent of this charge.’ Unfortunately, prior to that he had also told the police, ‘Look here, you know I was in it, but you have to prove it and I am not saying anything more.’ It is often the shock of arrest, for example after landing at Heathrow airport believing everything to be safe, that prompts psychotic razor-slashers to make incriminating comments such as that.