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Frankie Goes to Hollywood

The following interview with the notorious ex-criminal and author Frankie Fraser appeared in the 31 October, 1999 issue of the Sunday Business Post.

Frankie Fraser extends a hand: "lovely to meet you, sorry I didn't bring my pliers." He smiles broadly, revealing a full set of teeth, a luxury denied many who crossed him in the past. The pliers, gold-plated legend has it, were a Fraser trademark, used to extract the teeth of obstinate villains in the days when Mad Frankie was one of the most feared men in the London underworld.

But that was then and this is now. These days old-time gangsters are the new celebrities: best-selling authors, conductors of coach tours to old gangland haunts, TV chat-show guests and website hosts - read Frankie's thoughts for the day on the www.madfrankiefraser.co.uk website.

Few gangsters have made the transformation from crime to showbiz as seamlessly as Fraser. But then, few have access to such a fund of material. Forty-two years in prison, certified insane three times, the recipient of the cat-o'-nine-tails five times, fed a bread-and-water punishment diet more times than any prisoner this century, a friend of the Krays and enforcer for their supposed rivals, the Richardson brothers: "Lovely guys, Reggie and Ronnie, smashing fellows, but they didn't have the brains of Eddie and Charlie, the Richardsons were a different class. But the rivalry, that was a media invention."

Now in his late 70s, surprisingly small of stature and thin as a reed, it's hard to reconcile this amiable raconteur with the 'most dangerous man in Britain' label two home secretaries felt compelled to award him. But if the past is a different country it has also become a well-travelled thoroughfare, abounding with stories of horror, poverty and violence, now honed to nicely rounded anecdotes. The kind of raw material any novelist would give, well, their teeth for.

There are builders in the south London flat Fraser shares with his partner, Marilyn, so we adjourn to a nearby working-man's caff, where his life is unveiled to the accompaniment of a hissing cappuccino machine.

Fraser credits Marilyn, a singer in her early forties and the daughter of great train robber Tommy Wisbey, with keeping him straight for the ten years they've been together, "the longest I've been out of prison for." Fraser has warm memories of a spell he shared with Wisbey in Leicester prison. "The governor there was real tough. Tommy said to me, 'what'll we do?' I said, 'we'll do the governor. But we won't poke him, he'll only show off his bruises the next day."

Instead, Fraser and Wisbey gathered some buckets of slops on the landing for the governor's next visit. "He comes in with the chief probation officer of Leicestershire and a home office minister, boasting about how he's got them all, Mad Frankie and a train robber. Then we put the buckets over his head. All you could see was little turds dripping down his head."

Frankie's early courtship, needless to say, was not uneventful. "We were just leaving a club after a lovely drink," Fraser recalls, "when this guy shot at me. After the first bullet hit me, Marilyn slung her arm around my neck and pulled me out of the way, shouting 'you bastard' at him."

The assailant, whose next two shots missed, was never caught, though Fraser says he recognised him as an undercover cop: "The police knew I was going to write my books and they didn't want their image to sink any lower. Thought I wouldn't survive and they could put it down to gang warfare." Miraculously Fraser did survive, the bullet later extracted from his forehead by a surgeon, and the scene of the shooting is now a stopping point on the Mad Frankie coach tour of gangland London.

Fraser's remarkable survival instincts were honed on the tough poverty-stricken streets of Waterloo, where he grew up, a short distance from where he now lives. His father, a Canadian seaman, and his mother, from County Cork, were, he says, as straight as they come. "They worked seven days a week for peanuts," he says. "My mum had three jobs, cleaning. They were hard times, no money at all. But she was proper Irish, every penny they had went to put grub on the table for us.'

Brought up a Catholic, he can still recite hymns in Latin. Fraser recalls the day he became an altar boy, "A good one too, my mum and grandma were so proud."

Scrupulously honest, his father would have no truck with charity. "We'd wait until he went to work at 4.30 in the morning,' Fraser says. "Then me and my sister Eva would walk over Waterloo Bridge to get sixpenneth of stale bread. My mum was more down to earth, when she saw the bread her face would light up."

Would have his life have worked out differently if he had come from a criminal background? Fraser pauses to reflect. "I would have made a better thief," he says finally.

Fraser's reputation as a fighter, slight as he was, began in a clearing at the bottom of his street. "All the local fights took place there," he says. The women's fights Ð they came from the London Wastepaper Company down the road Ð were tremendous, really tore into each other. The bookmakers would set up there and I'd be running around putting the bets on. I had my own first fight there too.'

Trained as a boxer, Fraser soon learnt to look out for himself. Behind his parent's backs there was thieving too, often with Eva, "the only other thief in the family, who went on to become a successful shoplifter before an early retirement. The turning point in his life, says Fraser, came at 17, when he received his first birching, in Borstal, for attacking a prison officer.

"It was in the war, when they were saving water and you could only have a tiny amount of water in the bath. This prison officer - Holy Joe, we used to call him Ð he kept coming in, maybe seven times, when I was in the bath. Making me nervous. So I lost me temper. I'm out by this time, and said something and he punched me. Now I was a fit kid Ð I've never smoked Ð so I give him a triple punch, knocked him into the bath and tried to drown him. Well, I would have had more chance of winning the lottery in that water. Now I'm charged with gross personal violence. I told the magistrate the prison officer punched me first. Doesn't make any difference."

Fraser's punishment was 18 strokes of the birch, 15 days on number one diet (bread and water), 42 days of number two diet (a milder version of one) and 14 days without a mattress. "After that I changed; before, I'd only hit someone if they hit me first, but that brought out the aggression in me, after that I was violent."

Indeed he was. In and out of prison. Now his reputation would go ahead of him, and a meeting with Billy Hill, "the best gangster of all time," in Wandsworth prison would cement his career choice. From this point, though, working for Hill, and later with the Richardsons, most of Fraser's adult life would be spent inside, where the antipathy between himself and the governors and prison officers would add years to his sentences.

"My problem was being small," Fraser says. "I was always thin, and the bread and water didn't help. The prison officers would look at me and think, ÔI'll show that little cockney so and so', you know, make a name for themselves. I was always in trouble but I'd never give in to them."

What was it, then, that made Fraser risk such constant and often brutal punishment, when most other inmates would knuckle down and see their time out. Did he have no fear at all? For the first time, Fraser seems upset by a question. "I had fear, I'm not inhuman. I just bottled it, pushed it down. It's just one of those things, like people giving up smoking. You just bottle it."

He is grateful to prison for at least one thing. It was in the prison library that he discovered books. "They did have good libraries, even in those days. I used to love PG Wodehouse, Jeeves and all that. In fact, that's what gave me the idea to start doing country houses."

Fraser was certified insane three times, though he says that the first two were intentional on his part: he had seen the slightly improved lifestyle in the hospital wing this led to. The third time I wasn't even trying; I thought they knew I'd been acting when I was in the nut house. I was sending cards to my mates in the cells, saying come and have a bit of this, it's a good thing. But they went and certified me insane again anyway."

Oddly enough, the nickname that would spread the Fraser legend far and wide would come from another source, and not until 1965. Fraser was working with the Richardson brothers, Charlie and Eddie, who controlled the south London underworld scene.

"It was that lovely fight at Mr Smith's night club. There was this other gang, we thought they were friendly with us but they sent out for two guns Ð a 45 and a shotgun. It was war. John Wayne would have been proud of us. This guy shot me in the thigh. The police alleged I took the gun from him and killed him. Which, of course, I did: I wasn't going to pat him on the back, was I?

"This guy, Henry Bottoms, he saw me do it and he shouted, 'you're fucking mad, Frankie'. Sorry for swearing, but that's what he said.

"Anyway, he put it in a statement in court, and it was used in evidence against me. Thank God Bottoms was shot dead himself a few years later. Mad Frankie had been going before that, but that's what really made it official, a cult saying."

It was Fraser's association with the Richardsons and Krays that would bring his name to a wider audience. Though he denies that there was anything more than friendly rivalry, he believes they both might have lasted longer if they had joined up. "Billy Hill did his best to bring us together. Reggie and Ronnie were lovely guys, they'd pay the rent for old age pensioners, that sort of thing, but as businessmen they were deadheads.

"They might have been a little envious of the Richardsons professionally, but not in a nasty way. They did come round to my office and ask to be put in on a couple of deals, but I had to explain it wasn't possible for all of us to make a profit, not with the overheads. But things never got out of hand, which I suppose was down to me."

Fraser was to make other, less predictable, friends in prison. "I was in top security with some IRA prisoners, "lovely fellows. Some prison officers wanted us to mix it with them but I'd have none of it. We realised they were soldiers fighting for their cause, whether you liked it or not. And a good cause it is really, they wanted their country to be all Ireland, nothing wrong in that.

"I'd been done for assaulting prison officers and was up before the magistrate in prison. He said, 'some prisoners would like to give evidence on your behalf.' So, in come three IRA men. They all salute me and say, 'Mr Fraser is a gentleman.' Of course, it wouldn't have made any difference if Churchill had given evidence for me but it came from the heart. I lost 800 days remission that time."

After the Parkhurst riots, in which Fraser played a prominent role, he says that the IRA treated him as an honorary member. The connection with Ireland was to continue. Fraser and Marilyn later attended a Republican POW's wedding. "A good IRA man, loved him. In prison he was a hero to me, I mean he had to be after what he did. I said, Ôyou blew up the Old Bailey and Scotland Yard? Come here and give me a cuddle."

Fraser has become a regular visitor to Ireland. "I love Ireland, we both do. Of all the countries I've been to, it's the best. The people are so lovely and friendly, lots of good food and they know how to have a good time."

Marilyn chips in: ÔWe're hoping to get married in Killaloe next year. You're one of the first to know that," Fraser says. "Nowhere else I'd want to get married. I know my mum would be up there, saying Ôwell done, son."

One of Fraser's early TV appearances was on the Gay Byrne show, where Marilyn sang Someone to Watch Over Me. Irish friends of ours said, Ôdon't go on there, he'll slaughter you', but he was very reasonable and Marilyn sang out of her skin. Afterwards, we met the guy who played Father Ted. What a lovely fellow, took us out on the town, never met us before. We were so upset to read that he died."

The flirtation with showbiz seems likely to continue. A CD with rap star Tricky ("I helped his uncle out inside") and several gangsters, including Charlie Richardson, is due out soon and, after many false starts Ð Richard Burton was once interested in playing him on screen Ð Fraser has finally okayed a script of his life for a film. As he looks back on that life, I ask, finally, does he not have any regrets with the way he lived it? He pauses to think.

"No, I'm pleased with the life I've had. I've stuck by my own little principles in my own little way, principles that meant a lot to me in our world Ð I mean, I'd rather die than grass on anyone. Regrets? Well I wish I'd robbed bigger banks and I wish I'd never been caught."

Frankie Fraser's latest book of memoirs, Mad Frank and Friends, is out in paperback, published by Warner Books buy it at Amazon.

See also 'Turning Point' - an interview with singer Juliet Turner that appeared in the Sunday Business Post in September 2001.

 

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