We laughed and we laughed. There was a pecking order, even amongst the lowest type of prisoners. It was better to be a grass than a sex offender, even though being a grass was a pile of shit.
I had another laugh along the road at Parkhurst – I had been moved there again. Looking back, perhaps I shouldn’t be laughing. It turned out that the vicar in Parkhurst was inviting all the weirdos, including the Yorkshire Ripper, to Bible readings and afternoon tea. Anyone who was sane never went. Sutcliffe was mad and went to Broadmoor, but he started his stretch at Parkhurst in 1981, where he was attacked by a Scottish prisoner called Jimmy Costello: Jimmy followed Sutcliffe into the hospital wing at Parkhurst and cut him on the face with a broken coffee jar. The Ripper’s wounds needed thirty stitches, and he didn’t get any sympathy from anyone at all in the prison.
Apparently, the vicar refused to invite Graham Young, the teacup poisoner, to his little gatherings, for obvious reasons.
Young was a real oddball. He became fascinated by poisons when he was a young schoolboy and began to test them on relatives. He couldn’t wait to see the poisons taking effect. They nicked him for trying to kill close family and a school friend. He went to Broadmoor to start with, and we were horrified when he arrived at Parkhurst. We knew he had tried to poison more than seventy people, and we kept him well away from the teapot.
It must say something that the vicar felt safer having people like the Yorkshire Ripper round for tea.
Neville the Devil was a real psycho. He was always washing his hands and his cell floor was like polished glass. Everywhere Neville went, the screws were a bit iffy: we knew he had the potential to cut people with a butcher’s boning knife – he had more scars on his face than a map of the Underground. Even Reggie Kray warned us to be careful, because Neville turned on his own people. Reggie said Neville couldn’t be trusted.
Neville and I got on really well, and he used to call me by my middle name, Luke. But I had to be careful. When he came into my cell, I lifted up my mattress and showed him a sharpened blade from a pair of garden shears. If ever I thought he was going to cut me I was ready to stab him. He ended up as one of my best friends, and we often sat down and had a bit of puff and all that. He had beautiful photos of his daughter and we used to look at them. When I did the money lending in jail, he would go around and make sure I got the interest back. We used to eat together, and had many chats about violence – but I kept that blade well sharpened.
Despite all this kind of excitement, one of the worst things about prison was the boredom. Charlie Richardson started organising what he called ‘loon nights’, where the weirdos told their stories. We had the nutters in, and they would tell us about their cases and their beliefs.
One night Charlie was in his cell with a couple of guys and he said, ‘Tell Bobby what you just told me.’
This prisoner, called Jason turned to me and said, ‘An angel came into my cell. It came down and it had big wings. It had bronze feet and fire coming out of its legs.’
I went, ‘That is absolute bollocks. I’m not having that!’
His mate, Lennie the Lid, said, ‘Yes, there was an angel. I saw it, too.’
I thought that was a real loony bin. I gave them a fiver to get a bit of puff and have more hallucinations. They were hanging around looking for a bit of puff anyway, and had hoped I would lend them the money, so I obliged.
Then there was a geezer called Fletcher. He had a scar down the side of his boat race where Ronnie Kray had cut him with a pin. Charlie called him in and asked him to tell me his tragic tale.
Fletcher had been a soldier, and had had a child with a woman who was messing about. He had this kid at his house sometimes, and one weekend she dropped the kid off.
Fletcher thought the world was so wicked that he didn’t want the kid growing up in it. He strangled the kid, but then panicked because she was coming back to pick up her son. He cut a hole in the chair, broke a broom in half and stuck the handle up the kid’s backside. So the kid was sitting there as if he was writing his homework, but he was as dead as a doornail. You can see the sort of nutters I was in with!
I met so many characters inside. There was Rocky, an ex-boxer who punched above his weight at Parkhurst. They nabbed him for armed robbery, and he was given seven years for his troubles.
Rocky was a six-foot, lean, mean fighting machine. He had short dark hair, a flat boxer’s nose and dark brown eyes – quite a good-looking guy. Rocky was happy-go-lucky, enjoyed a laugh and everyone liked him. He also fancied himself as a bit of a chef.
Prisoners cooked their own meals because, that way, they knew what they were eating was safe. Prison officers worked in the kitchens, too, and did their best to supervise in there, checking on who had access to kitchen equipment. As it happened, everyone had blades hidden back in their cells anyway.
They kept the ingredients well away from people like the teacup poisoner. Parkhurst contained the country’s most dangerous psychopaths and lunatics, so you can imagine how careful everyone was. Rocky always managed to find quality ingredients, and he cooked lovely meals for his mates.
This muscle man worked in the kitchens, which meant he was an early riser; the kitchen orderlies prepared breakfast and they worked while everyone else dozed in their cells. One morning, while he helped to prepare breakfast, Rocky assembled the ingredients he needed for the evening meal. His favourite dish was spag bol, and so he selected some mince, spaghetti, tomatoes and garlic (a speciality on the Isle of Wight), plus bacon, celery, carrots, onions, bay leaves, parmesan cheese and olive oil. I’m sure he put other stuff in it, but those were the main ingredients.
Rocky took what he could find in the kitchen and ‘borrowed’ ingredients from the other orderlies. As he checked his recipe against the stuff he’d got together, Rocky realised he was short of an onion. He spotted one in a cupboard, and added it to his food pile.
A nasty-sounding voice snapped: ‘That’s my fucking onion! You’re a thief. Give me back my fucking onion.’
‘Fuck off,’ Rocky snarled, closing his bag of food with the onion well and truly buried in there.
He’d never liked Harry the Cook, a thug from the North who’d proved far too handy with swords and knives. He was a huge bloke, with an overhanging gut, string vest and smelly armpits. Despite that imposing frame, Rocky would have destroyed him in a bare-knuckle fight.
‘That’s my last onion, so I want it back now or you’re going to get whacked.’
Rocky wasn’t going to back down. ‘You’ll get it back some time – just fuck off. What would you want it for anyway? It would only make you cry, you big baby.’
‘Give it back now, or you’re brown bread.’
‘Fuck off.’
Something was going to give as the battle for the onion became a verbal duel. In prison, you can never back down if you’re challenged.
‘I warned you,’ Harry hissed as he reached behind one of the cupboards and produced a gleaming blade. He’d been using it under supervision while preparing the meals, but had hidden the kitchen knife instead of handing it back.
The sun flooded into the kitchen, with rays dancing around the shining pots and reflecting on Harry’s razor-sharp knife. One thrust in the stomach and Rocky’s blood was shooting out all over the place; Parkhurst had never seen so much claret spilled.
‘Help me, help me,’ Rocky pleaded, gasping for breath. Harry pushed the blade in as far as it would go and then removed it from my pal’s bleeding stomach.
Alarm bells sounded all over the place and screws appeared from every corner of the prison. Rocky had lost too much blood; his face was a contorted mess as the pain surged through his body and, at the age of forty-one, he knew his time was up.
I was really upset. Rocky came from a lovely family and was a solid guy and a dear friend to me; he also came from my manor, which made it even more personal. My heart went out to him and his family and I thought it was a waste of a good guy’s life. He ended up dying because of an onion. I
keep hearing people say that prison is a holiday camp; I don’t know what holiday camps they go to, but they would shit their pants if they went to the ones frequented by the likes of Rocky and me.
Then there was a conman at Maidstone called Novak. He was a notorious type who used to do postal fraud. He was a Canadian Jew, and very well heeled – he was even connected with President Truman. He was a very wealthy man, a multi-millionaire. His daughter used to come in a Rolls-Royce to visit him.
An Indian kid called Pulak was running the laundry. We used to have our shirts starched and we wore tailored, made-to-measure clothes in prison. It was all bravado … we used to smuggle in our own shoes and all that. This Pulak charged as much tobacco as he could for doing the work. He was a greedy bastard, but it ensured that Novak lived like a king.
Novak, a professional conman, used every trick in the book and you couldn’t trust him. He was just a bit smarter than the rest. People threatened to bash him up, but his favourite reply to that was: ‘I’m an old man with a weak heart.’ He’d been arrested at the Dorchester Hotel while he was eating lobster thermidor. He used the ‘old man, weak heart’ line again and asked if they needed to embarrass him with handcuffs. He said he would go quietly, and so a copper walked him to the front door of the Dorchester. Suddenly, Novak span round and kicked the young copper in the bollocks. He then legged it up the road, bumped into another copper and was nicked.
After he told me that story he asked if I would become his minder, because so many people were chasing him. I was happy to look after him for money, because he was a character and made me laugh. When guys came looking for him after he’d pulled a stroke, I said, ‘Fuck off. More mug you for falling for it.’ He really conned Pulak, the young Indian kid, saying he had talent and would be useful in business later. Novak showed him pictures of flash cars and promised him the world. The conman could have anything he wanted, within reason, and it was all provided by Pulak.
Novak also had a scam where he used the girls in the prison office to type up letters as if from Harrods. The letters said that he was chief buyer there, and asked for free samples from overseas companies to see if they were good enough to sell in Harrods. So he had all this quality stuff coming in from abroad. He opened up a warehouse to keep it in, and then sold it to stall traders. He then said his operation had run into trouble, and couldn’t pay the girls. They were furious, but what could they do? Instead, Novak offered them stock, which he said would be worth a lot more than their wages.
‘You can have tights, because every woman wears tights,’ he told them.
When the women went to sell the stuff they discovered that they were tights for pregnant women. Not quite what they expected.
Novak was even conning the screws as well, because they didn’t believe he could con them. Everyone was bunging him and it just went on and on.
When he got out, the head of security was waiting because Novak was gate-arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as he left the prison. Apparently some of the conman’s operations in Canada had been rumbled, so his freedom had lasted for only a few minutes.
As he left, he handed over an envelope to a screw, grassing on Pulak. It said: ‘Bye. Don’t be so greedy.’
Pulak was raided and all his tobacco was seized. Novak was a man who could not be trusted under any circumstances!
There was a big, fat geezer at Maidstone called Nagi who owned nightclubs and strip clubs in Wales. He was always talking about having anal sex with women. Nagi was a Pole and he was always eating. He had sandwiches everywhere, and he would eat anything. He asked me to get him stuff out of the kitchen. We managed to get him liver sausage and all that, and Nagi would buy it for double the usual price.
I was earning well off Nagi and he was my best customer. I paid the guy in the kitchen for giving me the stuff, but still made a good profit. Nagi was always buying food off people. If they were cooking a meal, he would say he wanted a bowl of it in exchange for a bit of tobacco. That guy just kept eating. He looked like Friar Tuck, and was just a glutton.
Nagi wasn’t content with sausages and other meat, because one day he approached me: ‘Bobby, I love a bit of rabbit. Could you get me some rabbit, please, so I can make a stew?’
Two Hell’s Angels – lifers in the garden party – smuggled food in and out of the wing, so I asked them if they could get hold of a rabbit. They seemed willing, so I left them to it. I hadn’t ordered a rabbit before, but felt confident that one would arrive to satisfy Nagi’s enormous appetite.
Lo and behold, a couple of days later a parcel of greaseproof paper arrived on the wing with what looked like a fresh, skinned rabbit inside. ‘Can’t get much fresher than that,’ I thought, looking at the neatly packed animal.
‘This looks just the job,’ Nagi said. ‘How much do I pay you for this rabbit?’
‘A fiver will be a sweet deal,’ I told him.
In those days we were getting a tiny allowance a week, so £5 was good money. This was good business. Anyway, he cooked the animal and ate it without any complaints.
I kept supplying him with this and that, including more sausages, some fresh fish, and the occasional rabbit. My scheme was working well, with Nagi paying on the dot and me rewarding the guy in the kitchen.
One day, Nagi ordered a collection of vegetables, nicked from the garden, and I knew what was coming.
‘Bobby, I enjoyed those rabbits so much that I would like another one. Could you get me another rabbit?’
Outside, the garden party were happily digging away when they uncovered a gruesome sight – a pile of cat skins. The screws assumed that the Hell’s Angels had been performing some bizarre Satanic ceremony with the cats but, when word reached me, I feared that the cats had served a different purpose.
There were several cats around the prison, and they did a good job of keeping control of mice and rats. They lived in the boiler house in the winter, and that was where they had their kittens. We just called them the boiler house cats and left them to it.
I ran across the wing and confronted one of the Hell’s Angels. ‘What the fuck is going on? What’s this about cats? Have you been selling me cats instead of rabbits?’
‘It’s the same thing,’ one of them explained casually, not quite realising the gravity of the situation. ‘With the head, tail and feet cut off, Nagi didn’t notice the difference, did he?’
‘That’s not the fucking point,’ I growled. ‘I can’t go and tell the geezer that I’ve been selling him cats instead of rabbits. Even worse, he’s been eating them.’
I kept on supplying Nagi with all sorts of food, apart from rabbit. I explained that they had become scarce and difficult to get hold of. I tried to keep it all quiet, but stuff like that spreads like wildfire in prison. The guys all got stoned and couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Everyone in the prison, except Nagi, knew that I had been providing him with cats to prepare his favourite stew.
The upshot was that whenever Nagi walked along the landing, everyone went: ‘Meow, meow …’
Somehow he didn’t twig but, on the day I was due to leave, I decided to come clean.
‘Nagi, do you remember that I got you a couple of rabbits?’
‘I had a couple of rabbits, yes,’ Nagi recalled. ‘Very nice they were, too, and succulent. They had quite a unique flavour and went very well with my carrots and onions. I used a traditional Polish recipe and should have given you a taste.’
‘Nagi, I have to tell you that the –’ I tried to say.
‘Those rabbits were very, very nice.’
‘Yes, but –’ I tried again, still not able to get a word in edgeways.
‘Are you saying that you could get me some more?’ Nagi butted in, his voice growing louder with excitement.
‘They were fucking cats,’ I blurted out.
‘What? What? Cats?’
‘Nagi, I had no idea. They were sold to me as rabbits and that is the truth. Here’s your money back.’
It didn’t make m
uch difference whether he believed me or not, and he wasn’t interested in a refund. He stuck his fingers down his throat, even though the cats had been consumed a few months earlier, and reached for the slop bucket.
As I left my cell and prepared for the great outdoors, I could hear his words ringing in my ears: ‘Bobby, you bastard … Bobby, you bastard! You fed me cats. You fed me fucking cats!’
‘That stew must really have been the cat’s whiskers,’ I joked to myself as I left Nagi in his cell with an overflowing bucket.
There was another reason why prisoners liked to cook their own food and eat in their rooms: we risked our lives every time we went down to collect our meals. Usually we were in no hurry; it was best to avoid the queues as the mealtimes were really a madhouse.
At Parkhurst, I was on the middle floor with Charlie Richardson and Reggie Kray. We could look down and check on the length of the queue. After the cells opened in the morning, a member of Charlie’s firm would bring up hot water for our tea. Charlie had a big, square table in his cell, so we usually sat around that for a cuppa and a chat.
One breakfast time, an Irishman called Francis McGee was queuing, innocent as you like, when another inmate, John Paton, produced a blade and stabbed McGee to death. It was all in the papers. What was Paton doing in there? They must have known he’d killed another prisoner in Wakefield with a bed leg in a row over home-made booze. In Parkhurst, that was a killing just waiting to happen.
This time, Paton had filed down a piece of steel and stabbed McGee nine times. Amazingly, the row was about a game of chess. McGee admitted cheating in a game of chess years previously and made a joke about it. Paton didn’t think it was funny, so he went back to his cell, collected his weapon and that was the end of McGee. Alarm bells went off and screws were running everywhere.
I Am Not A Gangster Page 14