Bronson 3

by Charles Bronson

  NOLTE, NICK (actor) – Arrested after his luxury car was spotted veering towards oncoming traffic and failed a field sobriety test administered by the State police.

  O, STEVE (Jackass stuntman) – Arrested in Scandinavia for a Jackass drug-smuggling stunt when the madcap extrovert swallowed a condom of marijuana and was found to be in possession of Ecstasy when police in Sweden found Ecstasy and five grams of cannabis in his hotel room. The no-holds-barred stuntman was locked up for one week after Steve O claimed in interview that he swallowed a condom full of marijuana before entering the country.

  PACINO, AL (actor) – In 1961, Pacino was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. Charges were later dropped after Pacino claimed he was en route to an acting gig and was to use the gun for the scene.

  PAYNE, CYNTHIA – At her trial, Ms Payne was given sympathy from the public and was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, in Holloway Prison. The charge of ‘keeping a disorderly house’ found distinguished supporters falling over themselves leaping to her defence.

  PENN, SEAN (actor) – Jailed in 1987 for assault after attacking a film extra.

  PERCY, HENRY (9th Earl of Northumberland) – Now this geezer really was a man after my own heart. Shared his imprisonment with Sir Walter Raleigh. He was lodged in the Martin Tower on suspicion of plotting against the Crown (Gunpowder Plot). While in prison, he renovated the place, even making the windows larger and having a bowling alley built in the garden. He also made hooch from his own still. Now that’s what I call prison!

  PHILLIPS, JASON (So Solid Crew member) – Jailed for four years after being found guilty of possessing a loaded handgun; Phillips is the second member of the notorious group to receive a custodial sentence for possessing a gun. The band faced repeated claims that they glamorised gun culture.

  PIGGOT, LESTER (Royal jockey) – Jailed in 1985 for a year for failing accurately to declare tax on his earnings. Was also stripped of his OBE … but what about Ken Dodd?

  REEVES, KEANU (actor) – Arrested for driving under the influence, he decided to straighten his life out after seeing his police mug shot.

  ROSE, AXL (heavy-metal singer) – Arrested for assault, property damage and in a separate incident he threatened an airport security guard who was searching his bags.

  ROSS, DIANA (diva) – Arrested on board the ill-fated Concorde after an altercation with an airport guard. In a ‘tit for tat’ fracas, Ross grabbed the security woman when she was humiliated after the guard gave her a thorough frisk when her belt set off a metal detector.

  RYDER, WINONA (actress) – Found guilty of shoplifting £3,500 worth of goods from an exclusive department store in Beverly Hills. In her defence, Ms Ryder had allegedly gone to the Saks Fifth Avenue store prepared for a shoplifting spree – armed with scissors, a big bag and tissue paper to wrap the stolen goods in after a film director told her to do it as preparation for a movie role.

  When security guards confronted her, she said, ‘She came, she stole, she left. End of story.’ The court sentenced Ms Ryder to three years of supervised probation for two felony convictions and also ordered Ms Ryder to complete 480 hours of community service, complete drug and psychiatric counselling and pay up some $10,000 in fines and restitution.

  SHARIF, OMAR (actor and gambler) – At seventy-two years of age, this guy is a real handful. After he had been gambling at the Enghien-les-Bains casino in the suburbs of Paris, over the course of the evening he had lost 30,000 Euros. He then got into an argument with the croupier and a policeman was called. Sharif then insulted and headbutted the policeman. Sharif was given a one-month suspended prison sentence and fined 1,500 Euros.

  SIMPSON, OJ (actor) – Simpson was charged with first-degree murder in 1994 for allegedly killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend outside her LA home. OJ was acquitted of the charges, but he was held liable for the killings by a civil jury and was ordered to pay $33.5m to the victim’s survivors.

  SINATRA, FRANK (crooner/actor – deceased) – Arrested for ‘Breach of Promise’! He was locked up for sixteen hours in the Bergen County Jail back in 1938. Broke off an engagement, but hell hath no fury like a woman scorned! She had Sinatra arrested, but the charges didn’t stick to the Teflon Don Juan!

  SLATER, CHRISTIAN (real name Christian Michael Leonard Gainsborough, actor) – Arrested for assault and battery in a domestic incident. He was reported even to have tried to grab a policeman’s gun. Also arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, and again in 1994 for attempting to take a gun on a plane.

  SMITH, ANNA NICOLE (pole dancer and filthy rich widow) – Arrested for the US charge of DWI (Driving Whilst Influenced).

  STROUD, ROBERT (Birdman of Alcatraz) – Probably the most famous inmate ever to reside on Alcatraz. Portrayed in the film The Birdman of Alcatraz by Burt Lancaster, Stroud was shown to be a sad and badly done to prisoner. But, in reality, he was a totally different character.

  In 1909, he viciously murdered a bartender who had failed to pay a prostitute he was pimping for. Stroud shot and killed the bartender and then he took the man’s wallet as compensation for the prostitute.

  In 1911, Stroud was convicted of manslaughter, and he was sent to serve out his sentence at a federal penitentiary in Washington State called McNeil Island. While at McNeil, he was a violent prisoner.

  A hospital orderly had grassed on Stroud for trying to get drugs by threats and violence. For this, the orderly was viciously assaulted. I don’t agree with grassing, but I don’t agree with drug use … so I’ll call this a draw between Stroud and the orderly. I wouldn’t have been able to beat the orderly up, but I could have certainly pushed him off a cliff. On another occasion, Stroud chivved a fellow con.

  Stroud had a six-month sentence added on for the stabbing and he was ghosted out of McNeil to the nice Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, USA.

  Now, one of the things that screws shouldn’t mess a con over is his or her visit! The screws refused Stroud a visit with his brother, so he stabbed a guard to death in front of 1,100 cons in the prison Mess Hall.

  Sentenced to death for first-degree murder by hanging, Stroud was banged up in solitary confinement awaiting his sentence. In 1920, Stroud’s dear old mum managed to convince Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States of America, to commute her son’s death sentence to life imprisonment without parole.

  Because of Stroud’s unpredictability, he was permanently placed in the segregation unit, to live out his sentence in total solitary. After 30 years at Leavenworth and after finding an injured bird in the recreation yard, he developed an enthusiastic interest in canaries. The prison allowed Stroud to breed birds and maintain a lab inside two adjoining segregation cells.

  Eventually, having raised nearly 300 birds in his cells, Stroud wrote two books on canaries and their diseases. He even developed and sold medicines for various bird ailments. But didn’t old Stroud go and get caught with a still which he used to make prison hooch; he made the still out of some of the equipment he had requested for his canaries.

  In 1942, Stroud was transferred to Alcatraz, where he spent the next six years in segregation in D Block and then eleven years in the prison hospital.

  In 1959, he was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.

  On 21 November 1963, at the age of seventy-three, Stroud died from natural causes. The original Birdman had never been permitted to see the film in which Burt Lancaster depicted Stroud as a Mr Nice, which was a far cry from how Stroud had actually spent his fifty-four prison years in solitary … beats my thirty years of time served!

  TOWNSHEND, PETE (rocker) – Insisted he entered a child porn site as part of a research project on paedophilia. Received a caution. Townshend had been caught when his credit-card details had appeared among 7,272 names handed to the police by the US Postal Inspection Service.

  TYSON, MIKE (World Champion boxer) – Former Heavyweight boxing champion was arrested in 1991 for raping Desir�
�e Washington in his hotel room. Tyson was sentenced to ten years in prison.

  VAUGHAN, JOHNNY (TV presenter) – Jailed at the age of twenty-four after being found guilty of possessing cocaine and ‘concerned with the supply’.

  VICIOUS, SID (real name John Ritchie, punk rocker – deceased) – Arrested in 1978 for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in a New York hotel. He was gang-raped while awaiting trial and was then released on bail and it is thought that the trauma of this and the loss of his girlfriend caused him to go into a severe depression. Prior to going to trial, he died of a drugs overdose. Rumoured to have had his ashes spread on his Jewish girlfriend’s grave in a covert operation carried out by Sid’s family.

  WEILAND, SCOTT (singer) – Violated his probation conditions on his conviction for heroin possession in 1998 and was jailed in 1999.

  WILDE, OSCAR (poet/writer – deceased) – He found himself in a homosexual affair with the Marquis of Queensberry’s son, Alfred Douglas, whom he left his wife for in 1895. The Marquis of Queensberry accused Wilde of being a ‘ponce and sodomite’. Nowadays, he’d call him a ‘butt fuck’.

  Wilde lost a libel case against being called this and then found himself prosecuted and imprisoned for homosexuality under the terms of the Criminal Law Amendment Act.

  Wilde was first imprisoned in the notorious Newgate Prison and then transferred to Pentonville Prison. Eventually, Wilde was released from Reading Prison in 1897 and moved to France. Prison ruined his health, cutting short his life, and he died in 1900.

  The only things Wilde and I have in common are that we’ve both served time, we both despise the system and we’re both well-known poets. OK … Wilde’s a bit better known than me! A piece of work that was inspired by Wilde witnessing an execution is as follows:

  Dear Christ! The very prison walls

  Suddenly seemed to reel,

  And the sky above my head became

  Like a casque of scorching steel;

  And, though I was a soul in pain,

  My pain I could not feel.

  I only knew what haunted thought

  Quickened his step, and why

  He looked upon the garish day

  With such a wistful eye;

  The man had killed the thing he loved,

  And so he had to die.

  Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

  By each let this be heard,

  Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word,

  The coward does it with a kiss

  The brave man with a sword!

  WOODGATE, JONATHAN (Premiership footballer) – He was found guilty of affray in connection with the attack on an Asian student, Sarfraz Najeib, in Leeds. During the trial, fellow team-mate Michael Duberry dramatically turned the tables when he changed his story from a previous version given. Woodgate was ordered to do 100 hours’ community service.

  WYNGARDE, PETER (real name Cyril Louis Goldbert, actor) – Caught committing an act of gross indecency with another man, Richard Jack Whalley, 24, in the public toilets of Gloucester bus station on the evening of 8 September 1975. Caught red-handed in the act by police, the pair were arrested. Appearing at Gloucester Magistrates’ Court on Friday, 17 October 1975 under his real name of Cyril Louis Goldbert, he was fined £75 for the gross indecency.

  6

  BRONSON VS. THE SYSTEM

  The following chapters concern the threat of legal action in the form of a judicial review brought upon the Secretary of State for the Home Department by Charles Bronson’s legal team on 14 March 2003 following an alleged assault by prison staff at HMP Full Sutton and subsequent refusal by the governor of HMP Whitemoor to allow external medical staff deal with Charlie’s medical needs. Dr Bob Johnson and Isabella Forshall were acting on the instructions of Charlie’s legal team. This case was never proved in court and throughout the prison service maintained that they had done nothing wrong and it has never been proved otherwise in court. A police investigation (Humberside Police) into the alleged assault at HMP Full Sutton ended with no prison officer being charged with assaulting Charlie.

  What happens when you’re all alone in a prison environment and the staff mess around with you?

  I was severally assaulted in HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs in 1994. Below is a report from one of my legal teams at that time. I hope this provides details so that you can see there was an agenda within HM Prison Service to do me harm. Why wasn’t my case added to the many prisoners’ cases who put a multi-party action in against HM Home Office Department? So many people have failed me in my bid for justice.

  I want to show you how prison deaths are possible to cover up. If major assaults against a high-profile prisoner such as me can be covered up, then so can prison deaths. I have already requested that my legal team carry out an investigation if I should die behind bars for any reason. Even if I were accidentally to slip in the shower and bang my head and then die … they are to bring in a private team. None of my organs are to be removed and carted off – I make that clear here and now. All are to be examined by my legal team’s nominated party, not the Home Office vets!

  RE: CHARLES BRONSON ADVICE ON MERITS AND QUANTUM

  1. I am asked to advise Mr Bronson on merits and quantum in relation to an assault upon him by prison officers at Wormwood Scrubs.

  For the last three or so years, Mr Bronson, a serving prisoner, has been the subject of a regime known as continuous assessment. The reality of this regime for him is that he seldom spends more than a month in any prison, always segregated, and in conditions of extreme security.

  2. THE FACTS

  On 29 October 1994, he was being held on the block at Wormwood Scrubs. He had attended a memorial service for his father (whose funeral was being held the same day) the day before. He was feeling understandably oppressed by the conditions of his confinement and, as often in the past, Mr Bronson wished to spend the day in the strong box. He had requested to do so the day before in a note to the Senior Officer. In the morning, he slopped his cell out, naked, as is his frequent custom, and said to the prison officers with him – not a group he was accustomed to seeing on the block – ‘Let’s go to the box.’ He was then attacked by the officers with sticks, boots and fists. While they were attacking him, the officers taunted him, ‘Hit the bastard …’, ‘We’ll teach you …’, ‘Your mum’s dead,’ ‘Smash his hands,’ ‘You won’t work out with Belmarsh screws,’ and so on. He the small belt …’ There was then a struggle to squeeze Mr Bronson into the small belt, during which he became unconscious.

  3. He woke up alone in an unfurnished cell, very tightly belted, with swollen wrists and fingers, vomit on his body and blood on his body and on the floor. He was in pain, felt as though his chest was on fire, his breathing was heavy and neck stiff. He believed he was having a heart-attack. The belt was removed after about nine hours. Mr Bronson spent the next three days in this cell and on Monday, 3 October 1994 was moved to Wandsworth.

  4. EVIDENCE OF INJURIES

  At Wormwood Scrubs, it seems from medical records that Mr Bronson was visited by a doctor at 9.45am on 29 September 1994 in order to decide in accordance with procedure whether he was fit to continue to be restrained. The doctor’s note records: ‘Because of this man’s violent state, he was unable to be examined. Looked through the cell window. Lying on the floor, restrained.’

  Nevertheless, shockingly, the doctor recorded his view in the Register of Non-Medical Restraints that there was ‘no clinical contra-indication to continued restraint.’

  The next day, Mr Bronson refused to see the same doctor, who described him, memorably as, ‘lying comfortably on the floor’. It has been Mr Bronson’s way over many years of prison confinement to give a wide berth to the Prison Medical Service. These two visits explain eloquently why.

  5. After his arrival at Wandsworth, Mr Bronson was able to get in touch with his solicitor of the time and she arranged for him to be visited by a non-Prison Medical Service doctor that day, the
3 October 1994. Sadly, neither party treated the visit as a forensic medical examination. Mr Bronson agreed to the doctor’s request to show him his right index finger which was visibly infected, and accepted topical antibiotic medication for it.

  6. On 4 October 1994, Mr Bronson saw his solicitor, Margaret Morrissey. She listed his injuries seen by her, without asking Mr Bronson to remove his clothes, as follows:

  HEAD

  1. Bruised red end swollen right cheekbone.

  2. Bruised left eyelid, small mark under right side of eye.

  3. Bruised right eye ‘under the lid’ towards the nose.

  4. Cut inside lower lip.

  5. Bruise in middle of upper lip.

  6. Graze to right-hand side of chin.

  7. Swollen left temple.

  8. Lump and bruising behind right ear.

  HANDS

  9. Swollen and bruised right middle finger.

  10. Nail of right index finger missing; blackish and red in colour, green around the edges.