Inside the Firm by Tony Lambrianou

Author:Tony Lambrianou [Tony Lambrianou and Carol Clerk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781857828238
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2012-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

WHEELS OF JUSTICE

I’d spoken to Jack The Hat McVitie on and off for years, but I never got to know him closely until 1967. It all began in a pub called the Mildmay Tavern in Balls Pond Road, Dalston. I often went there to see Pa Flanaghan, whose wife ran the pub; they had a family of sons whom I was also friendly with. I went in there one night early in the New Year, not long after my release from Bristol prison, with Jack The Hat and two other men called Jimmy Briggs and Patsy Murphy. I had bumped into them in another pub, the Greyhound, further along the road.

Patsy was later to become involved in the well-known seventies’ Luton Post Office robbery. He was given life and a twenty rec., on the word of a grass, and walked out of the sentence twelve years later after three different Home Secretaries had referred it back to the Court of Appeal. It was the first time fresh evidence had ever been allowed into that court. Patsy’s father, Stevie, had a club, the Senate Rooms, in the Angel, which was burned down after a fall-out with a firm in north London.

Jimmy Briggs was another one who would end up in a well-known trial: he was done with George Davis for a robbery at the Bank of Cyprus. Davis had just been freed on appeal from a fifteen-year sentence for an Electricity Board job, following the famous ‘George Davis Is Innocent’ graffiti campaign of the early seventies. He was released over a technicality. When he got nicked for the Bank of Cyprus job, he got another fifteen years. It was like a tit-for-tat victory for the police.

Anyway, Jimmy, Patsy, Jack The Hat and I were sitting having a drink in the Mildmay this night when Patsy said to Jack The Hat, ‘Tony’s just come out of the boob [prison].’

Jack said; ‘Anything I can do for you?’ He’d done time himself, Jack, and he told me he’d been responsible for the Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson’s escape from Winson Green prison the year before. Charlie, who had been serving thirty years, hit the headlines many years later when he was shot dead by an unknown assailant in Spain in 1990.

At eleven o’clock, closing time, we went off to a club called the Tempo which had recently opened in Holloway Road at Highbury Corner. It was being run by an East End lad called Freddie Bird, an ex-docker who was only about five feet ten in height but very, very broad. He had recruited a few Geordies and Jocks with broken noses, the typical thing, from out-of-town firms, dressed them up in dickie bows and stuck them on the door, which made them a target for us lot and the rest of the London firms.

When I walked into the club with Jack The Hat, Jimmy and Patsy, I knew something wasn’t right. Freddie Bird was a bit apprehensive about letting Jack in, because he’d had a drink: he was a very unpredictable character who could be highly dangerous.

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