Free Gangland UK: The Inside Story of Britain's Most Evil Gangsters by Christopher Berry-Dee Page B

CCTV camera with a broom while he stood on a table, but he had to climb on to the roof instead when he realised he could not stretch far enough to reach the camera. A footprint left on the table showed a similar pattern to a pair of Reebok trainers found at Conaghan’s home after his arrest.
    A fortnight before his death, Francis called Richardson on 71 separate occasions; however, Richardson returned only five of the calls. The frustrated man’s attempts came to a head on 11 May 2003 – three days before his death. Mobile phone records also showed that Richardson was in contact with the two hitmen in the lead-up to the killing.
    £ 3 million of the original £ 26 million from the Brinks Mat robbery is still unnaccounted for.

4
The Kray Brothers
    ‘Who loves you, eh? That’s right, Mummy loves you, you little monsters. Mummy loves you more than anything - more than all the cakes, more than all the jewellery, more than all the chocolate in the world.’
    VIOLET KRAY TO RONNIE AND REGGIE AGED 3
    I met Ronnie Kray at Broadmoor Hospital in 1984, where he bought me a Diet Coke. Immaculately dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, black shoes, tie, and sporting a gold ring with ‘RK’ set with diamonds, he chatted to me for an hour at a table in the airy visitors’ room with its view of sweeping grounds leading down to the high perimeter wall.
    It was autumn. While waiting for Ronnie to grant me an audience, I watched inmates with wheelbarrows, brooms and rakes sweeping up leaves into neat piles before a mischievous wind sent them scattering again, leaving me to ponder just for a moment on Broadmoor’s grim history.
    Broadmoor was the country’s first purpose-built asylum for the criminally insane. Completed in 1863, it houses about 500 men and 120 women. Lying on the edge of the small town of Crowthorne, in an area of heathland known as Bracknell Forest, it is one of four maximum-security hospitals in the UK.
    The ‘facility’, as our US friends call such places, was built under an Act of Parliament to reform the poor conditions in institutions such as Bethlehem Hospital, the original ‘Bedlam’. Its imposing classical Victorian architecture was the work of Major General Joshua Jebb, a military engineer who is said to have based the building on two other hospitals – Wakefield and Turkey’s Scutari Hospital, near Istanbul.
    Joshua Jebb was no slacker. He participated in the Battle of Plattsburg in Canada during the War of 1812, and surveyed a route between the Ottawa River and Kingston where Lake Ontario flows into Saint Lawrence River.
    Around 1876, Jebb was appointed Surveyor-General of Prisons, busying himself with the construction of prisons at Portland, Dartmoor, Pentonville, Chatham, Mountjoy in Dublin, and Portsmouth. He was awarded a KGB for his civil services on 25 March 1859.
    Yet, even in retirement, he found time to consider the construction of embankments on the River Thames, and of communications between the embankment at Blackfriars Bridge and the Mansion House, and between Westminster Bridge and Millbank.
    One of the most remarkable characters of his time, Jebb married twice and, aged 70, died on 26 June 1863, having enjoyed a passing acquaintance with a gentlemanwe met earlier, Marriott Ogle Tarbotton, who followed him to the grave in 1887.
    On meeting Ronnie Kray, it was extremely difficult for me even to begin to envisage that he was mentally disturbed, even less criminally insane. He didn’t provide any obvious outward signs to suggest as much, or talk about the rats and mice that were infesting his cell – as did Paul Beecham, another Broadmoor patient I had previously interviewed. Sentenced to life for slaughtering his parents, and subsequently released as ‘cured’, Paul went on to murder his wife and then fatally shoot himself. So much for successful reintegration back into the community
    Unlike some of his contemporaries at Broadmoor, Ronnie was never regarded in the same demonic way as