by Dick Kirby
That was all he did say; he had nothing to say at his trial and after legal submissions by the defence, Mr Justice Mocatta directed the jury to find him not guilty of the murder. However, on 24 June he was found guilty on the affray charge and, sentencing him to five years’ imprisonment, the judge told him:
This was an extremely serious and shameful affray but there is no evidence that you used or carried a weapon of any sort. Your record is a bad one and your last conviction was wounding with intent for which you were sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.
Meanwhile, Charlie Richardson was in South Africa, where he had already met and bedded the glamorous Jean La Grange, the wife of a business associate; hearing of his brother’s plight, he resolved to return immediately to ensure that he would not be convicted and imprisoned. He could hardly be faulted for not trying hard enough, because he set to work with a will.
*
The trial of Eddie Richardson and his six co-defendants opened at the Old Bailey before the Common Serjeant, Mr Justice Griffith-Jones, on 1 July, one week after Fraser’s conviction.
Approaches were made to the jury, but the judge directed that the case should continue, telling the jury, as judges always do, to ‘put this out of your minds’. However, the judge ordered that the jury should receive police protection and stated:
I propose to request the police to take every possible step, not only to discover who is doing this, but also to ensure that no other incident of this kind can occur.
The four-week trial ended on 26 July with the jury unable to agree on verdicts in respect of Richardson, Stayton and Moody in the September sessions. Haward and Botton were found guilty and the following day both were sentenced to five years for causing an affray, with Haward receiving an additional three years for being in possession of a loaded shotgun.
On 12 September the retrial of the three men started. After two weeks Stayton and Moody were acquitted but Eddie Richardson was found guilty of affray. Judge Aarvold told him, ‘There was evil afoot in the club that night and you were prepared to play your full part in it’, and sentenced him, like the others, to five years’ imprisonment.
Neither Charlie Richardson nor Johnnie Longman attempted to nobble the jurors or suborn the witnesses at the retrial, nor did they attend court. They had been unavoidably detained. Six weeks previously, they – and quite a lot of other people – had been well and truly nicked and were now in prison, on remand.
CHAPTER 17
The Torture Trial
On 18 May 1966, in the lead-up to his arrest, Charlie Richardson had divorced his wife; he also obtained a flat for Jean La Grange. Two months later, their affair was discovered by Jean Goodman and after a tremendous row she flounced out of his life, forever, as she thought; in fact, their separation lasted exactly fifteen days.
Charlie maintained that the night before his arrest he was forewarned by a go-between or a bent copper – stories differ between him and his biographer, but at any rate he was expecting the police on the morning of 30 July 1966. The arrest, he believed, would be a fit-up; it would probably cost him a couple of grand to brush off this latest peccadillo. So when the police arrived, he could hear them downstairs and pretended to be asleep. As they entered his bedroom, embarrassed and whispering to each other, he appeared to wake up and smilingly demanded, ‘And who the fuck are you?’
Then, according to his memoirs, he sat up in his pyjamas and contemptuously told them, ‘The kettle’s downstairs; mine’s with two sugars.’
So that was Richardson’s version of events of that momentous day. Did he receive advance warning of his arrest? I doubt it, although it’s clear that he did have bent coppers on his payroll. But just for the record, what happened was this.
On the morning of the arrest, Gwyn Waters entered Richardson’s house; the back door had not been locked, so he let in McArthur and Fred Gerrard, then went into the bedroom and shook Richardson, who was sound asleep, awake. He stripped off the sheet which was covering him, to find that he was just wearing underpants – ‘And they were filthy’, Waters told me. ‘The whole house was filthy.’ There were no smart, contemptuous remarks from Richardson; he was simply stunned.
He wasn’t the only one; John Simmonds was one of those tasked to arrest Roy Hall and he recounted what happened:
We were briefed in the early hours of the morning at Tintagel House; I was allotted to Detective Superintendent Vic Evans’ team with seven other officers. I was partnered to a DC from Hertfordshire and I think Evans thought I was also from Hertfordshire. We went mob-handed to the address we had for our target but he was not there. Evans had an ‘intelligence’ sheet of contacts and other addresses for our man and was proposing to visit them. There were two brothers of our target at the address; I spoke to one of them and he ‘volunteered’ where his brother was. When I told Evans he said it was not on his intelligence sheet and proposed to visit the other addresses first. As I was convinced that the brother had not lied to me, I persuaded Evans to let me and the DC from Hertfordshire to go to the address.
On our arrival the door was answered by a small boy; he said his Dad was in bed. We rushed upstairs to find our target in his vest and underpants; he launched himself at us like a rat trying to escape through the door. We threw him back on to the bed and after a struggle managed to handcuff him; the prisoner calmed down, we searched the house and in the lounge we found a fully loaded handgun clearly placed in a strategic location and I have no doubts had he not been handcuffed, the prisoner would have used it.
In a twelve-hour operation nine other people had been arrested and taken to West End Central police station. They were Jean Goodman (who would be charged under the name of Richardson), Albert John Longman, Derek Brian Mottram, Robert Geoffrey St Leger, James Thomas Fraser (the nephew of Frankie), James Henry Kensitt, Thomas James Clark, Brian Morse and Alfred Abraham Berman, and they faced sixteen charges – not all of them for the same offences – of inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent to do so, demanding money with menaces, conspiracy to defraud, robbery with violence and assault. McArthur had done his work well; and that was just for starters.
Charlie Richardson invariably described all the detectives with whom he had dealings as being bent, stupid, overweight, sweaty, with green, rotting teeth and foul breath; but no one even vaguely resembling that description entered his cell to cop a couple of grand and let him off the hook.
No. That same day, England won the World Cup against West Germany, and when the BBC’s commentator, Kenneth Wolstenholme, uttered those prescient words, ‘They think it’s all over . . . it is now!’ he might also have been referring to Charlie Richardson’s reign of terror.
For the man who had been acquitted of receiving stolen goods on no less than fourteen separate occasions, it really was all over.
*
Now the job began of protecting the witnesses. As John Simmonds explained:
These were not normal witnesses, i.e. run of the mill citizens who had witnessed an event and reported it to police, but witnesses who themselves had been engaged in criminal activities and were now giving evidence against other criminals. In the eyes of the criminal fraternity they were ‘grasses’ and were hated by all criminals. It followed then that, once their identities were known, the witnesses were at risk of attack by any criminal. In 1966 there was no witness protection system and we were thrown in at the deep end.
Each witness was offered 24-hour police protection and depending on their location the nearest officer to them was assigned as their bodyguard. As I lived in Potters Bar I was assigned to Benny Wajcenberg, who lived in Edmonton. The arrangement was that during the week he had a uniformed constable outside his home from 6.00 pm to 8.00 am and I would take over from 8.00 am when he went to work to whenever he came home – very often nearer to midnight than 6.00 pm. At weekends he had 24-hour uniformed police cover.
Although we were assigned as ‘bodyguards’ it was rather a joke, we were not armed and had no radio or telephone
. Any concerted effort to take Benny out would have been child’s play and of course I was obviously going to be taken out with him. In 1966 detective officers were expected to dress smartly, i.e. suit, collar and tie, so in my opinion any gangster coming looking for Benny would spot me as dressed like a detective and would have probably taken me out first. It took me about two days to realize my vulnerability so I quickly dressed to blend in with the location and started to ‘work’ on the premises as if I was an employee. Soon people visiting the premises assumed that I was a worker there and I did my best not to draw attention to myself.
Being right in the East End my biggest fear was that, despite their known animosity, the Krays might still take out ‘Benny the grass’ on behalf of the Richardsons and gain kudos from it. I expressed this fear to Billy Ackerman, Benny’s partner. Billy was a known associate of the Krays and thought they were great guys. He told me that the twins knew Benny was on their ‘manor’ and that I was there and he said that I was safe from them as they were not going to help the Richardsons.
Guarding Benny was no picnic, I had a telephone call from the station officer at Edmonton police station one weekend complaining that Benny had climbed out of his bathroom window and gone into the local pub and got drunk while the PC was standing outside his house ‘protecting’ him. The first the PC knew of it was when Benny came rolling up the street, well drunk.
Benny liked his scotch and many an evening after work we reverted to the pub where he drank scotch as if it was going out of fashion. I limited myself to shandies and had to deliver him home, inebriated. Maria, his second wife, used to get very angry with him and accuse him of consorting with women and Benny always used to say to me, ‘Johnny, never marry your mistress.’
Whenever he had business meetings away from Fashion Street I used to take him in my car; although I was in attendance on the premises I was very rarely au fait with the transactions, but I knew Benny to be a wheeler-dealer and sometimes we brought cloth etc. back with us in my car. I told Benny that if I ever found out he had put stolen stuff in my car I would ‘nick’ him. I think he recognized I was serious.
However, at the outset I had a personal briefing from Mr Mac who informed me that I needed to be very careful with Ben, there was an International Arrest warrant out for him and Mr Mac did not want him being arrested and deported before the trial. He had cleared this with the Director of Public Prosecutions and I was to ward off any zealous officer who may try to arrest Ben. Some months later two CID officers from City Road police station came into the premises at Fashion Street and asked for Ben. I showed out who I was and asked them what the problem was; they told me to mind my own business and I explained what the situation was. They said they were going to arrest Ben and threatened to arrest me for obstruction if I tried to stop them. I had no choice but to let them go. I immediately rang Mr Mac, who, as I understood later, rang the detective chief superintendent at City Road and he in person went to the back gate at City Road and as those two DCs drove in, the DCS stopped them, told them to ‘fucking well take him straight back’ and see him when they had done it. A short while later Ben came The Torture Trial back with the senior of the two DCs who came up to me and asked what was going on. I told him it was none of his business and he should have listened to me at the start.
Security was very strict. Arthur Porter BEM was a member of No 4 Unit of the Special Patrol Group and he outlined the escort system for me:
The system was that we paraded at 7.00 am, taking the car and two carriers to Vauxhall, to pick up the prison van and driver, then to Wandsworth prison to pick up Frankie Fraser, who was already serving time, then to Brixton for the rest of the bunch. There were also a couple of Traffic Patrol outriders. We then went ‘on the blue’ from the prison to the Magistrates’ Court, during the rush hour in twelve minutes. One of the sergeants became the van sergeant with a PC on the back door of the van. There was some suggestion that there would be an attempt to escape from the van and firearms would be used, so we carried revolvers in a shoulder holster so they were out of sight. Whilst at court, the Unit provided extra cover and when proceedings finished, we would then make the return journey.
Amidst a large police presence, the accused appeared at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on the morning of Monday, 1 August, when pleas for bail were made.
‘Advocates can renew their applications next week’, said the magistrate, Mr K.J.P. Barraclough, adding, ‘different considerations may then arise.’ He remanded everybody in custody.
But upon their next appearance, as far as the defendants were concerned, matters had only deteriorated. More arrests had been made, and further charges were being considered by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). And after Jean Richardson’s further application for bail before a Judge in Chambers had failed the previous week, DCS Gerrard, when asked by her counsel, ‘You know she has five children to look after?’, was able to reply, ‘I know that is not so’ and went on to tell the court that they were Charlie Richardson’s children and that she had not been looking after them for some time. Everybody was once again remanded in custody.
The prosecution started outlining their case for committal proceedings on 30 August 1966 at Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court. Four more prisoners were in the dock, which had been enlarged to accommodate two rows of them – the newcomers were Frank Fraser, Eddie Richardson, James Moody and William Stayton – and sixteen police officers surrounded the dock. It took thirty-five minutes for Mr E.J.P. Cussen for the DPP to read out all the charges. The following day, the first of the prosecution witnesses was called; this was Christopher Glinski, who had given evidence in the Jack Spot trial eleven years earlier.
He stated that he had been attacked, an assault which caused him actual bodily harm, by Frank Fraser, his nephew James, Johnny Longman and Robert St Leger who also demanded sums of £350 and £200 with menaces. The men had pulled the curtains at his office at 190 Vauxhall Bridge Road before launching the attack in December 1965.
Glinski told the court that he had attended four identity parades which had been held at Brixton prison the previous Thursday to try to identify his attackers. ‘I asked the officer if the man in the blue suit could say something’, he said. ‘He was then asked to say a date or something like that. That was James Fraser.’
This prompted an outburst from that defendant: ‘You’re a liar – why don’t you tell the truth?’
Another of the prisoners – it was probably Frank Fraser – shouted, ‘That’s a blooming lie. I’ve never been there. He’s an innocent man and you know he’s innocent.’
However, Glinski’s evidence in respect of St Leger was less than convincing, and after the lunchtime adjournment Mr Cussen offered no evidence on the charges relating to him. Although he was discharged by the magistrate, St Leger was remanded in custody in respect of another quite unrelated charge, one of conspiracy to defraud.
It was round about this time that there was a little trouble concerning one Francis Davidson Fraser. It is thought that there had been a problem with his walking stick, which the prison warders had taken away from him. He had complained, and when he was collected by the prison van the following morning, it had been restored to him. But he was in an unpleasant mood and having been locked in his compartment in the prison van he started banging on the partition with his stick. This prompted Sergeant Arthur Porter from No 4 Special Patrol Group and a constable to pull open the cell door and to exclaim, ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ Since Arthur Porter was a pretty tough character, awarded a British Empire Medal for gallantry for the arrest of a gunman, Fraser probably realized he was outmatched and apologized. However, this did not improve his mood.
On 3 September Taggart gave evidence, and a pretty horrifying account it was too. Bundled into his car after being attacked in Jamaica Road by Thomas Clark, Frank Fraser and Charlie Richardson, he was taken to an office in a warehouse in Bermondsey:
I was attacked by feet and fists, by all three. After this
attack, all my clothes were taken off. After Richardson made several phone calls, Fraser picked up a wooden pole, two inches in diameter and several feet long. He smashed it across my body and head until it broke. By this time, my body was a mass of blood and also my head and the walls and floor of the office were splattered with my blood. I was made to clean the walls and floor with my own underwear. The men broke off for beer and sandwiches and then attacked me again. I wanted to remain conscious, because I assumed from the condition I looked in that if I became unconscious, then it might look a different matter altogether so far as these people were concerned; I assumed that I would automatically become a dead man.
Cue for an outburst from the dock: ‘You bloody liar, you ought to be writing for the newspapers!’
Taggart continued, saying that Alfred Berman had interceded on his behalf, asking the others to stop, but ‘It appeared that any suggestion Berman made was not agreeable to the others.’
It was later suggested that he would be freed providing he was willing to pay £1,000; Charlie Richardson then received a telephone call saying that his brother was arriving at the airport from Johannesburg and would have to be met, and he and Berman left the office. Taggart was left with Fraser, Clark and a man named Frank Prater; Charlie Richardson later returned with his brother and other people, men and women. When Taggart mentioned Frankie Fraser’s name, it provoked Fraser to bellow from the dock, ‘You liar! I have never seen him before in my life. It’s like writing a James Bond book the way he’s talking.’ (This was rather at variance with the account Fraser gave much later, saying he had been there.)
Taggart completed his evidence by saying he was later allowed to dress and was helped to his car; the following day, his business partner was asked to sign two cheques made out to Berman.
At one point, Frankie Fraser seriously lost his cool in the dock; whilst the prison officers were attempting to contain him, Edwin Williams (then Police Constable 212 ‘N’ and later detective superintendent), one of the officers drawn from the ‘N’ Division boxing team ringing the dock, stepped in, helped subdue him and took him to the cells.