‘I deal with ex-offenders in prison,’ I told him. ‘I’ve never done schools.’
‘Would you give it a try?’ he asked. ‘If you get to them before they commit crimes and end up in prison, it would be a lot better, wouldn’t it?’
‘That makes sense,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll give it a go.’
‘They’re a bit of a handful,’ he warned.
‘That’s all right. No problem,’ I assured him.
It was all approved with the relevant authorities, and so I went to work in the local schools. There was no political correctness with the kids: they were straight on to me, wanting to know what it was like to be shot. They needed to know what it was like to carry a gun, and I told them everything. I treated them as equals and shared all the information.
I laid it on the line about drugs: ‘Some of you will have seen drugs. Some of you will have been tempted to use them. Remember that they are not prepared by a chemist. It’s just a dealer putting a mix together, so who knows what is in the stuff.’
I held up a £10 note and asked them what it was. They confirmed that it was a £10 note. ‘That is how much your life is worth to a drug dealer. Once he has your tenner, he doesn’t care if you have a bad bit of gear that will kill you. If you have a bit of gear that doesn’t work, he will adjust the mix. You are his guinea pigs. He is testing the gear out on you lot. You are paying to see if he has the mix right.’
The children sat with open mouths and said nothing.
‘Sometimes you get brain damage and sometimes you’re dead. You don’t realise the grief you leave behind when you’re dead. Think about your parents and the people who love you.’
It went down well with the police, because they knew only too well what I was talking about.
My other angle was to stress the dangers and stupidity of carrying knives, guns and other weapons.
Many of the kids I spoke to were carrying weapons and didn’t realise the gravity of what they were doing. Word spread and we had loads of letters wanting me to go to more schools. I worked in as many as possible and even went to private ones. I made a slogan up: ‘Mugs take drugs and fools carry tools.’ The kids repeated it after me and that was a result.
After a constructive question and answer session, the entire class agreed that they should never carry weapons or be associated with anyone who carried them.
I was horrified to learn about the statistics for knife crime in London. In July 2013, I read that 1,000 people were victims of knife crime in the capital every month. The staggering statistic is that, in the first four months of 2013, eleven people were murdered in knife attacks in London. Around 400 were injured and many others threatened. A lot of those injuries were serious and life-changing.
It’s no consolation to me that the speed of the London Air Ambulance and the skill of surgeons are saving more lives. Those lives should never be put at risk in the first place, which is why my campaign to teach schoolchildren the rights and wrongs of it all will continue.
Glasgow, my friend Paul Ferris’s stamping ground, is Britain’s most violent city, according to the UK Peace Index, with London and Belfast second and third. I read the newspapers every day and haven’t been impressed with the sentences handed out. A large number of offenders only receive a caution, an absolute or conditional discharge, or a fine.
No, I would not send them to jail. What is the use of that? They would come out, brutalised by the system and even more violent, ready to strike again. If I had my way they would be force-fed a regime, similar to my routine in the classroom, until the message got through. They would go through a strict rehabilitation programme at a training centre. I would take them to see the families devastated by the use of weapons, and I would make them pay compensation to the victims.
One incident comes to mind, when I went head to head with Home Secretary Jack Straw on Radio 4. The government wanted to build three massive jails holding 2,500 prisoners apiece, rather than consider spending money on rehabilitation. During the Radio 4 interview, I pointed out the dangers of overcrowding. Imagine a riot in one of those! Where would the dangerous prisoners go? The public would be put at serious risk.
During the programme I also pointed out to Jack, using Home Office statistics, that prisoners had committed at least three offences other than the one they were inside for. I asked him if he agreed. He said he did.
‘So,’ I replied, ‘taking that as a yardstick, Jack, you are telling the public that, with these jails, you have catered for another 30,000 crimes to happen. If they cater for up to 10,000 prisoners, and each will have committed around another three offences, that is another 30,000 victims of crime.’ I was pointing out that all those additional offences are taken into consideration, but the offender is not convicted of them. I confronted him with the figures and went on about the extra 30,000 victims of crime. I stressed that one extra victim of crime was one too many. And I couldn’t see the point of incarcerating these people time after time when surely rehabilitation was the answer.
He wasn’t keen on my figures, but I pressed home the point that I was using his statistics and not mine.
I kept on: ‘But the ethos of a Titan jail is actually saying that. Are we talking about human warehousing, or rehabilitation? A prisoner should be coming out of jail rehabilitated, so that there are no more victims of crime.’
My argument was that the money should be spent, not on massive new Titan jails, but on educating prisoners and integrating them back into society.
The interviewer had a little snigger. When the programme ended, Jack said to me, ‘That was a bit below the belt, Bobby!’
I replied, ‘Your stats – not mine, Jack!’
Within months, the idea of Titan jails went onto the back burner – and disappeared. Jack and I have great respect for each other, and I am sure he will do me over during our next sparring contest.
He always highlighted the importance of punishing offenders; I continued to highlight the need to help them to go straight and stop offending. To be fair, Mr Straw does agree that the criminal justice system needs to give people the chance to turn their lives around, with a lot of the responsibility on the offender to seize opportunities. At the time of writing he’s still active with his ideas and I have the greatest respect for him.
As my work in schools continued, Baroness Newlove – before she was Baroness Newlove – accompanied me. Her husband, Garry, was murdered after confronting a gang of drunken youths. He caught them vandalising her car; the rabble kicked him repeatedly in the head and were nicked for murder. The couple had three young daughters, and it was such a tragedy for the family. Helen Newlove, as she was then, painted the perfect picture of what it was like to be a victim of crime.
I stood in front of the classes and asked the kids if they had been with people who carried weapons. Loads of them put their hands up. Many of them also said they had seen assaults with weapons.
‘It’s a way of life around here,’ one girl told me. ‘Everyone carries a weapon for protection.’
I explained that a guy carrying a weapon was thirty-three times more likely to be a victim of violent crime. And I said that, when an attacker jumped out of a car to cut the guy, the girl would be carved up as well.
‘Remember that, when people come looking for you, they will have weapons, too.’
Headmasters told me that kids were still going around saying: ‘Mugs take drugs and fools carry tools.’ It made me feel on top of the world and top of the class.
I could see that re-education wasn’t only needed in schools, however. I noticed that with many television programmes about crime – especially documentaries – the emphasis was on blood and guts and violence. Everyone likes reading a good crime book with all the gory details, or seeing things acted out on TV. My mission was to cover all of that, of course, but also to include stories like the guy who came out of prison, went straight, became educated and found a good job. Those good news stories weren’t sexy enough, but I battled on and had them c
overed, too.
More in-depth programmes followed, and my solo career took off. TV stations wanted to know all about the criminal underworld and how on earth a dangerous man like me could be rehabilitated. One of the companies with a feel for the subject was Talent South East, run by Kate Beal. There I met Fred Dinenage, a legend on TV and an expert on the operations of criminal gangs.
When Unlock won the Guardian Charity of the Year award in 2011, we had the opportunity to send three people to the ceremony. Two of the staff, plus me, were due to receive the award from Jane Asher. I pretended I was sick and couldn’t attend the event. I put names in a hat and picked out three of them.
The Guardian took a picture of Jane Asher and my three workers; they deserved their day because they had done all the work. I believe that is how staff should be treated and rewarded.
Just thinking about that day and the award fills me with pride.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE MIDAS TOUCH
WHEN AMI’S MUM became seriously ill with cancer, we flew out to Japan as much as possible to be with her. We would get up in the morning and spend the whole day in hospital with her. I returned to England to sort out some pressing business while Ami stayed in Japan with her mother.
One night I was sitting watching the TV when the phone rang. It was Ami. ‘You’d better get over here because Mother is not very good.’
‘I’ll be on my way.’
I brought Ami’s mum a little doll from England because she collected that sort of thing. She wouldn’t let anyone take it away from her. She looked so frail with tubes and all that coming out of her. My Japanese family are as strong as they come. They all surrounded Ami’s mum with their love. I had to return to England for business reasons and during that time my mother-in-law died.
Her death really cut me up because she was one of the most beautiful people you could ever wish to meet. She was buried at Mount Fuji with her husband, who had died previously.
Although Unlock was having success out in the field, I didn’t like the way things were going in the office. The charity was growing rapidly, but I had the impression that the admin staff – mostly straight-goers – had no real idea about the plight of prisoners or ex-offenders. They were reading all about it and guessing, which was no match for those who had lived it all. I wanted to change lives, not write essays.
Don’t get me wrong. Unlock is still going and I wish them all the best for the future. It’s just that I had a vision of ex-offenders and academics combining to move the organisation forward, and that did not seem to be happening.
Eventually, I moved on from Unlock because the charity was moving away from my original concept. People were phoning up and asking if their kid had to be a criminal to benefit from the scheme. Unlock was more of a policy thing, rather than being on the ground with the people. I wanted to be working at the coalface. I needed to be totally hands on.
I sat down and I thought about an idea I was calling ‘Midas’. I’d been working on a project for about six years, and I thought that I needed to build and expand that idea.
I talked to Paul Ferris, who led a colourful life up in Scotland and is the subject of The Wee Man film about crime in Glasgow. He knew all about violence, kids being dragged into street gangs, drug abuse, people coming out of jail with no work and all that. I said we had the same problem down south and maybe we should go into partnership.
‘We could call it Midas, build a Midas Centre and give the whole thing the Midas touch,’ I told him.
‘I like the sound of that,’ Paul said. ‘Let’s get together.’
I’d already talked to Charlie Richardson about my plan, shortly before his death. Charlie had been concerned about kids in South London carrying guns and weapons, meaning that the streets were not at all safe. He also had problems in his own family and he was trying to sort those out.
‘We need to get them before they go to jail,’ Charlie stressed. ‘Once they go to jail, we’ve lost them. When they’re in jail they get educated in crime, as we know only too well.’
And so Charlie Richardson, Paul and I set up the Midas Charity. We had a meeting in Charlie’s house in the summer of 2012. However, a couple of weeks later Charlie, bless his heart, became ill and passed on. We were just about to launch the project when he died.
I was devastated to hear about the death of Charlie Richardson.
More than 200 people attended the service at Honor Oak Crematorium in Brockley, South London. The least I could do was to handle the security, and I’m told it was like a military operation.
The arrangements, from flowers to invitations, were handled by Charlie’s wife, Ronnie. Photographs were not allowed; only the official photographer could take pictures.
When I look back, I think of Charlie building up his scrapyard business, finding this and that of value in the craters during and after the war. It was a few years before I did the same thing, and when we talked about post-war London we shared very similar memories.
I made the following speech at the funeral:
‘We are all here today to show our respects and support for Charlie and his family. I am not going to go into Charlie’s past. We know the media will do that but, as we all know, what happened to Charlie, Eddie, Frankie Fraser and the others was one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in legal history. It was based on lies, fantasy and corruption perpetrated by the state.
‘We all know Charlie was no angel, but he certainly was not the demon that the media and others would like to portray him as.
‘I would like to talk about the Charlie I knew. He was a dear friend, a tutor and a highly sophisticated businessman.
‘Charlie taught me many things when we served time together in Parkhurst while I was serving double figures for armed robbery.
‘Up until the time I met Charlie, my life was totally committed to crime and violence – as was the case for most of us here today. Charlie saw something in me that, at that time in my life, I did not see myself. Charlie was really switched on to people. He could look at them and know their strengths, weaknesses and potential. He told me that, if I carried on that way, I was going to get a life sentence or be shot dead. He said I was worth more than that.
‘He encouraged me to go into education. He used to give me books and newspaper cuttings about business and politics. We would have great discussions on many subjects. His mind was as sharp as a razor and his knowledge on various subjects was amazing.
‘But he also had a wicked sense of humour. We used to have one night a week where we would have a smoke and something to eat, and Charlie would supply entertainment.
‘This we called a “loon night”. Charlie knew the most bizarre prisoners with even more bizarre minds. But it was not just Charlie who could make you laugh.
‘His wife Ronnie has a wicked sense of humour. One of the last parties they attended together was for my wife’s birthday. People flew in from different countries, because Charlie had always been a globetrotter with his business schemes. One guy was a high-placed diamond dealer from the Middle East.
‘He introduced himself to Ronnie by saying, “I’m A-fief.”
‘Ronnie, who had had a few drinks, and not really being a drinker said, “You what?” He said again, “I’m A-fief,” to which Ronnie replied, “I should imagine most of them here are, but don’t go around advertising it.” He walked away, totally confused, and we all thought it was hilarious.
‘When Charlie and I met up after leaving prison, he was really interested in what I was doing and was really impressed with my set-up and what I have achieved.
‘I started up a charity with a few quid with a couple of other people, and then turned it into a million-pound business. We were fighting for prisoners’ rights, with Charlie’s invaluable help.
‘In later years, Charlie realised that real wealth was not just in minerals but in family, and his lovely wife, Ronnie, who he loved dearly and who was the jewel in his crown.
‘He loved and enjoyed
being with all his children and grandchildren, something I saw with my own eyes when they came to visit him.
‘The family is the most important thing in life. Crime and prison makes us all bad fathers, and it is our kids and loved ones who pay the price. Charlie realised this and wanted to do something good for all the kids on the street who came from the same background as us. And he was about to do that with us, before he died.
‘On the day he died it felt like someone had punched a hole in my chest and ripped my heart out. On that day I lost my dearest friend and a man I loved and respected. I will never be ashamed to say that.
‘I’m looking at Charlie’s family and friends and know we are all joined in this grief because we are all family, and we will always be there for each other. We will never wash our dirty linen in public or allow the media and those that hate us to divide us, because together we are strong; divided we are weak. Charlie created this family, so let’s keep it a family he would be proud of.
‘To you, Ronnie, and Charlie’s family, I give my condolences, my loyalty, and my love, and will always be there for you.
‘Charlie was and still is my dearest friend.’
Rest in peace, Charlie, my best friend of all time.
Life went on. We were waiting on the UK immigration people to grant Ami indefinite leave to stay in this country. Because of an on-going balls-up at the UK Border Agency, we were still waiting when we realised that her passport had nearly run out. We didn’t want Ami to be an ‘over-stayer’, so the day before her passport expired we took her to the airport and she flew back to Japan. It wouldn’t have been a good idea to have anything bad on her passport.
We had rented an apartment in Japan because of our regular visits and the high cost of hotels, so Ami stayed there with Kai while we tried to sort out her passport over here. If she’d handed over her passport in the UK, waiting for indefinite leave to stay, she wouldn’t have been allowed to go back to Japan. If anything had happened to Kai, she wouldn’t have been able to travel to see him.
I Am Not A Gangster Page 20