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

hurried up. I was told it was with the Home Office’s legal department. Eventually I was called up and told I’d been given six months off my sentence over this mistake. The original appeal, over the thirty months, was chucked out because the authorities felt I had no grounds for it.
     
    It was while I was in Bristol that my mother died. It happened on a Friday the thirteenth, in August 1965. I woke up that morning and – I don’t know why – I put on a jacket and tie, and had a shave. I was walking round on exercise with my mate Johnny Peebles, a Portsmouth boy, and I said to him, ‘I can feel there’s something wrong at home.’ Just before midday, I was working in the prison tailor’s shop when I was called out by a screw, taken into the main wing and shown into the Governor’s office. He said, ‘I have some very bad news for you, Lambrianou. Your mother has passed away.’
    There had never been any bad news in my family before, and Ijust didn’t believe it. Without realising what I was doing, I dived across the table. I just wanted to grab hold of the Governor and batter him.
    We’d all lived around my mother, the five of us, and all of a sudden she was gone. End of. It was a terrible blow. She had died in Newcastle, in the house she was born in, the first time in thirty years that she’d been back to it. For three years she’d lived on half a lung and never known it. She was a heavy smoker, one after the other, and her lungs had burnt out. And she worried a lot. She’d had a bleeding hard life.
    The night before she went to Newcastle Chris had a blazing row with her, and I always used to blame him in a little way for what happened. Throughout our long years away for the McVitie murder, I would always bring it up when we were arguing: ‘I blame you for the old lady.’ It was the one thing that would shut him up. I suppose, in my way, I was looking for some excuse for my mother’s death.
    Today we never, ever talk about my mother. We all feel a lot, but she’s never mentioned. She was a very basic, pure woman. What life had she had with the five of us? And when we were eventually in a position to do something for her, she wasn’t there. Chris and I were to make a lot of money from our criminal dealings, which would have made her life much easier; she would have gone short of nothing. But time didn’t give us the privilege of being able to do it for her, and that’s one of the biggest regrets of my life. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her.
    My mother was going to be buried in Newcastle the following Monday. I was told at lunchtime that day that, because of my connections with the London underworld, I would not be permitted to attend. The authorities believed my brothers would make sure I didn’t return to prison. They denied me the dignity of being with my brothers at my mother’s funeral.

     
    I was released in December 1966, having served almost two years. I would have been out before that if I hadn’t lost some remission for bad behaviour. I lost fourteen days for illegal bookmaking in the prison, and I had to serve two weeks without privileges and without associated labour – that is, labour involving the other men. For three days of this time I was on a number one diet, which was literally bread and water – a punishment that no longer exists. A bloke called Billy Thomas was also down the block – the punishment or isolation cells – for cutting another geezer in one of the workshops. He was on a normal diet; and he used to leave boiled eggs and other bits of food for me wrapped in paper behind the toilet.
    While I was away, Chris was out and about all over the country, getting up to all sorts of villainy. He would check into London from time to time, but he still preferred to be out of it. That’s how he acquired the nickname of London Chris. By the time I came out of prison he had set up a base in Birmingham, but I decided to stay in London and go to Chris, if and when he