Although the FARC story was my first real journalistic assignment, I had written an article for ‘Loaded’ before. It was a crime story and, in view of my background, I was obviously trying to play from a position of strength. However, I didn’t intend to concentrate solely on crime because I knew it to be something subject to the law of diminishing returns. For a start, the vast majority of criminals looked on the average journalist as nothing but a ‘grass’, a police informer. Many a criminal had had expose articles written about him and had been arrested as a result. And for a story to have any worth, one had to break new ground, reveal new facts. Once it became known that I was a crime journalist, less and less people would confide in me. So there would be no new facts to reveal and so, no story of worth.
This particular crime story though would reveal previously unknown facts without compromising anyone. Further, in view of the fact that so many of the leading characters had walked in and out of my life over the past thirty years, it was quite a personal story, even though the crime at its centre was so well known as to be almost public property.
The ‘Great Train Robbery’ is probably Britain’s most famous crime. When a gang of men stopped the Glasgow to Euston mail train in the early hours of the 8th of August 1963 and robbed it of £2,500,000 in cash it took its place in the history books as a unique case.
A brief examination of contemporary British crime reveals a phenomenon that was, to paraphrase Rousseau, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. It was inevitably characterized by a minimum of planning and a maximum of violence. The prolific and highly successful Bertie Smalls bank robbery gang even made a joke of it, calling themselves ‘the Crash, Bang, Wallop Gang’.
‘The Train’ was different though. Upwards of fifteen men were involved in a highly detailed plan that was put together over several months. Trains were timed, signals examined, escape routes planned and transport for the loot and a hide-out were bought.
The gang itself was something of a contradiction. Only a few of those caught (rumour has it that three got away) had experience of major, violent crime. The rest were a mixture of lesser criminals, minor criminals and even a couple of ‘straight goers’.
The actual robbery went well enough. Inside information had informed the gang that this particular load was worth taking. Communicating with walkie-talkies, the gang fixed a signal and stopped the train in a desolate part of Buckinghamshire in the early hours.
The ‘high value’ coach was uncoupled from the rest of the train and shunted further up the track. The robbers then smashed their way in and intimidated the Post Office sorting staff working inside. Then they formed a human chain to pass the 120 mail bags full with cash down the embankment. These were loaded into the backs of two Land Rovers and a lorry, which were then driven the twenty miles or so to Leatherslade Farm, the robbers’ hide-out. The robbery itself had taken just 35 minutes and they had stolen £2, 631,684, approximately £20 million at today’s values.
There was only one hitch. One of the robbers coshed train driver Mills. Mills recovered, but he never worked again. The 25 guineas he received from British Rail and the £250 from the Post Office could hardly have been much consolation to him. Most of the robbers’ loot was never recovered.
Mills died seven years later of bronchial pneumonia, chronic bronchitis and lymphatic leukaemia. At the inquest Leonard Curley, the Home Office pathologist, emphasised that, in his opinion, there was nothing to connect the assault with his death. However, both his wife and son said that Mills was never the same man again, and many of the public certainly felt that the experience hastened his death.
This far is all pretty much common knowledge. As is the fact that most of the robbers were caught and sentenced to very long terms in jail. What isn’t widely known however is the almost incredible catalogue of disaster and misfortune that has dogged many of them. It is almost as if they were cursed by the death of driver Mills.
It was late August in 1963 and although I was aware of the ‘Great Train Robbery’ my failing romance was totally at the centre of my concentration. It was a strange relationship by any standards, she, a fascist who’s brothers were personal bodyguards to Sir Oswald Mosely and me the son of Jewish parents. They had even prevailed upon me to look after guns they used for armed robberies. It had a predictable end.
Mad with jealousy over her latest infidelity I confronted Susan in he parent’s flat. Raging, she fetched the gun she used to keep under her pillow. Fortunately, her best friend Josephine was a witness to all this. The single shot came from the pistol I had been carrying.
Murder with a firearm was then a capital offence. The following morning I sat in a cell at Marylebone Magistrates Court, waiting to answer just that charge. My parents were both law-abiding folk and knew nothing of courts and procedures. My legal representation had been arranged by a friend who’s father had done several terms inside. As a result, through my door walked Brian Field, solicitor’s clerk to John Denbigh Wheater. They would help me prepare my defence for my trial at the Old Bailey.
Or, at least, that had been the plan. You can imagine my consternation when, a few weeks later, both Wheater and Field were arrested and charged over the ‘Great Train Robbery’.
In the event I was sentenced to six years for manslaughter and was sent to Wormwood Scrubs, where John Wheater became my library orderly and Brian Field my bridge partner. The latter experience was definitely part of the punishment. You learn an awful lot about a man when he is your bridge partner. Fortunately it didn’t last.
On the face of it Brian Field was just a solicitors clerk, but in realty he was a whole lot more than that. He had acted for Gordon Goody, also arrested for ‘The Train’, and other professional criminals in the past. In time, he had come to occupy that twilight world that sometimes exists between ‘straight people’ and the criminal fraternity. ‘The Train’ was his ‘bit of work’. He had put up ‘bits of work’ in the past.
From a professional criminals perspective, the trouble with Brian was that he thought it was all part of some jolly game. With his posh accent and his ‘hail fellow well met’ persona he was what criminals call a ‘silly bollocks’. Violent crime is a brutal, dirty business and it was very apparent to everyone that, if things got nasty, Brian wouldn’t have either the strength or the stomach to cope.
The 25-year sentence he received for his part in ‘The Train’ brought him right down to earth with a bump. Fortunately for him, before he could really come to terms with the enormity of the sentence it was reduced on appeal to five years. The Appeal Court decided that he had only been party to buying the farm as a hide-out and not to the planning of the actual robbery.
Brian served just over three years and the only hardship that befell him, apart from losing me as a bridge partner that is, was that his wife divorced him. On release he changed his name and started a new life.
By 1997 he had been free for ten years and was now a successful sales manager for an international publishing company. He had a pretty new wife, a Porshe, a nice flat in a select area and was flush with money. It seemed that he had put his past behind him and successfully re-invented himself.
One weekend, he and his wife were driving home along the M4 in the Porsche after a short break in the country. Traveling in the opposite direction was a Mercedes carrying the daughter of Paul Raymond, her husband and their two children. The husband was driving . He had been drinking.
Suddenly , the Mercedes swerved and hit the central barrier. It hit at precisely the spot where the barrier had been bent downwards in an earlier collision.
The Mercedes took off like a water-skier off a ramp. It hurtled through the air, turned upside down as it crossed the central reservation and, in a million to one accident, landed right on top of the oncoming Porsche. Brian Field, his wife and the four occupants of the Mercedes were all killed.
I too was released from prison in 1967, but unlike Brian Field I neither changed my name nor my way of life. Once again, the ending was predictable. In 1970 I was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing another criminal.
In the 24 years I spent in the system I met many thousands of notorious and violent criminals. I also met many of the ‘train robbers’ and, by comparison, they were nice guys. There was nothing vicious or nasty about any of them. And to those who would say, “Ah, except that is the violent and nasty crime they were convicted of”, I would answer that, for their sins, they were sentenced to phenomenally long terms.
Charlie Wilson was a nice guy, virtually nobody had a bad word to say about him, except perhaps the workers on the train he robbed. Charlie was a handsome-looking man, had a fine physique and possessed a personality full of wit and intelligence. I knew him through some of the darkest days of his 30-year sentence and never once saw him miserable or depressed.
Charlie was undoubtedly one of the most professional of the robbers, having previously been involved in the ‘London Airport Robbery’ when an audacious gang of ten men stole £62,000. If that doesn’t sound much by today’s values you must remember that you could by a large, London house for about £5,000 then.
He was amongst the first arrested for the ‘Train Robbery’ and was sentenced to 30 years in 1964. But within a year he had escaped from Winson Green Prison and fled to Canada. However, he was arrested there three years later and returned to England. He didn’t walk free again until 1978.
After his release, Charlie made a lot of money as a gold smuggler. Together with others he imported millions of pounds worth of gold coins, melted them down and sold the gold as ingots, so avoiding paying V.A.T. In 1984 he was arrested for a £2.5 million V.A.T. fraud, but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.
The following year he and another man were arrested for conspiracy to rob a security van whilst in possession of two shotguns. After four months on remand the charges were dropped and two Detective Constables involved in the case were charged with conspiracy to rob and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. A serious attempt had been made to frame Charlie.
In 1987 Charlie went to live in Spain. Perhaps he thought that it would be a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. However a serious threat emerged from a completely different source. Early in 1990 he offended a powerful, Holland-based drugs gang boss called Roy Adkins, after a friend of Charlie’s mentioned Adkins name in a court case. Some remarks Charlie had made about the case got back to Adkins.
Adkins was definitely not a man to cross. He had grown increasingly wealthy and powerful of late. With it had come the paranoia and he had ordered the deaths of several men. In April Adkins sent two hit-men to visit Charlie at his Spanish villa. Charlie was shot to death!