Mad Frank's Diary by Frankie Fraser & James Morton

Author:Frankie Fraser & James Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753554043
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

I’ll never understand what got into Dickie Hart that night in March 1966 in Mr Smith’s Club over in Catford. The night before, Eddie Richardson and I had just agreed to look after the club for that Manchester businessman, Owen Ratcliffe, and his partner. We were going to be allowed to put some of our machines in the club and later, when it was making a profit, take a cut. In the meantime we had to make sure there was no trouble. In the early hours Dickie just started shooting during a perfectly ordinary straightener between Eddie and Peter Hennessey, one of the brothers from South London. People have said Dickie was a Kray man but you can take that with a great pinch of salt. He was a good thief, that’s certain. You couldn’t fault him. Good-looking, a bit under six foot and he had a good name. I knew him when he came to the Bonsoir. I remember one night he ran up a bill, hadn’t got enough money on him and we just gave him tick. We knew he was good for it and, sure enough, two days later he came in and paid up.

Then that night he’d brought a gun into the club and when the fight started he went and got it from the cloakroom and starts blazing away in something which wasn’t anything to do with him at all. Then he shoots me in the thigh. Of course, he’d been drinking but even so. There was no alternative for me but to shoot him myself and it was right I was acquitted. After that it was all hands to the pump. Some ran out the front door and some out the back and I limped as best I could with me leg half off down the road, which was full of little terraced houses. The coppers got themselves in a right mess over the evidence. One copper says he saw me in the garden with the gun next to me and another copper says the first one wasn’t there at all. When it come to it I’d thrown the gun away in a garden about 50 yards from where I was found.

Quite a lot of us got away at first, but Jimmy Moody and Billy Stayton – who were trying to help me – they stayed behind. Luckily they got chucked. Ronnie Jeffrey wasn’t so lucky. He got shot but at least he got a not guilty at the end of it all. Of course Dickie Hart didn’t move. Eddie, who’d been shot in the leg, got taken to hospital and that’s where he got nicked. So was Harry Rawlings, who was in a bad way. He’d been shot as well but he got out of it too.

I suppose, in a way, I came out best because I was in such a bad way, because for a time they couldn’t question me, couldn’t verbal me up. By the time they did their boat had gone.

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