Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror by Tony Lambrianou Page A

some time in the cell with Frank while the jury was out considering his case. I remember giving him my dinner because I thought he was going to go down. He was acquitted. And I wasn’t.
    I was taken back to Wandsworth prison in a van with McVicar and Nash, who had been sentenced to eight and five years respectively.. I thought back to the last time I had seen McVicar, when I was walking along Essex Road in the Angel with Chris. We saw Frankie Shea there too. Frank waved us on, and we knew immediately that something was up and we should get out of the way. It turned out they were in a robbery – the same crime which brought them to the Old Bailey where, unfortunately for all of us, I saw them again.
    John McVicar, at that time, was in his prime. He was about twenty-three or twenty-four and was probably one of the top men of his profession. Strictly a robber, he had built up a solid reputation and was very well liked among the criminal fraternity.
    But he’s lost a lot of respect lately over his writings and articles. He sees himself as a professor of criminology, talking about prison reforms and pointing the finger at other people about their past. Considering the things he was involved in and the sentence he served, I believe he should keep his views to himself. He will be remembered more than anything for being one of the hard men of London and one of Britain’s most wanted villains, after his escape from Durham prison and the film McVicar which documented it. If I was a member of the public, I would view John McVicar not as a campaigner but as an ex-criminal.
    There were quite a few cons in Wandsworth at that time who were, or would later be, ‘celebrity’ criminals. One was Ronnie Biggs, a likeable fella who always had a smile on his face. Everyone used to point at him – ‘That’s Ronnie Biggs’ – and I think he liked that little bit of glamour within the prison. But I don’t think he expected for one minute to become what he is today. I was pleased – everybody was pleased – when he escaped. I’d only like to see him able to return to freedom in England.
    But the odd character apart, Wandsworth prison was the most doomy, gloomy place I could imagine being in. I was devastated enough that I’d been convicted, but this made the misery worse. Wandsworth was a law unto itself. There’s no other nick in the country like it.
    I immediately lodged an appeal, and while an appeal is running you’re still technically innocent. But the authorities failed to take note that I was an appellant. In the meantime, I was transferred to Chelmsford prison, and further charges were brought against me. It was said that I was in breach of the probation order imposed after the Ilminster Co-op case because I had broken the law again. But I could not have been said at that point to have broken the law again, because I was to all intents and purposes an innocent man until the Court of Appeal decided I wasn’t. But this didn’t occur to me at thetime. I was sent back to Bristol on the breach of probation order charges and sentenced at Wells Quarter Sessions to two concurrent sentences of six months, added to the end of my two and a half years. This made three years altogether.
    I stayed in Bristol to carry on with my sentence and did my best not to think about the extra time I’d been given. Then one day I came across another barrack-room lawyer. I was in the prison tailor shop when a con said: ‘They can’t do that. They can’t sentence you for breaking a probation order through criminal activity when you haven’t finished going through the channels of appeal.’ They’d jumped the gun. So I decided to petition the Home Office about it, petitions being the one form of protest always available to the prisoner.
    If you don’t get an answer within forty-two days, you can try to expedite it on Governor’s applications. My petition was in for seven months, and I kept going down to the Governor’s office, trying to get it