The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

During the Second World War, the Messina brothers became very rich. They were also very discreet, and their habit of moving between England and the continent made them elusive as well. They first came to the attention of the police when another gangleader, Carmelo Vassalo, tried to exact ‘protection’ from three Messina girls; there was a fight in South Kensington in which Vassalo lost the tips of two fingers. Vassalo and his gang were charged with demanding money with menaces, but Eugenio Messina also found himself in the dock for wounding Vassalo. He was sentenced to three years in prison. While he was awaiting his appeal in jail, one of his brothers tried to bribe a guard to ‘look after’ Eugenio, and received a sentence of two months.

In 1950, a newspaper reporter, Duncan Webb, ‘exposed’ the brothers in the Sunday People, and four of them hastily left the country. The fifth, Alfredo, made the mistake of remaining in his home in a respectable district of Wembley, convinced that the police had no evidence against him. Two policemen called on him, and when one left the room, the other alleged that Alfredo tried to bribe him with bundles of £100 notes. A judge disbelieved Alfredo’s defence that the policeman had asked to see into his safe, and extracted the notes himself, and Alfredo received two years in jail. A large proportion of London’s underworld was convinced that he had been ‘framed’.

Two of the brothers, Eugenio and Carmelo, established themselves in Brussels; but the Belgian police were determined not to allow them to establish a foothold, and in 1955 both were charged with carrying loaded revolvers. At their trial in Tournai, one indignant middle-class mother told how her daughter had been seduced by Eugenio, who had then proposed that she should go to London to ‘work’. The mother accused Eugenio of being a white slaver and persuaded her daughter not to go. Evidence like this led the judge to sentence Eugenio to seven years. Carmelo, whose health was poor, received two.

Attilio Messina, who had returned to London, was also brought to bay by angry parents. Edna Kallman, a woman in her early forties, told how she had been returning home from her job as a dressmaker in 1947 when Attilio had offered her a lift in his car. He took her to dinner, seduced her, and installed her in a flat in Knightsbridge. After two years, he told her that she either had to get out, or work as a prostitute. Cowed and miserable, she agreed. She was moved to a flat in Bond Street, and made to solicit in the street. As her health began to fail and her looks to deteriorate, she attracted a poorer class of customer; Attilio made her work twice as hard. One night, she called the police to help a fellow prostitute who was being beaten up by a client. Attilio told her grimly that he would deal with her the next day. Convinced that this meant something worse than the usual beating, she fled to the home of her mother and stepfather in Derby, and told them the whole tragic story. They went to the police, and Attilio was arrested. Although he insisted that he was a respectable antiques dealer, he was found guilty, and sentenced to four years in prison. This was virtually the end of the Messinas as a power in the underworld.

Gang life in England was always violent; but until the 1960s it was far less ruthless and dangerous than its American counterpart. The case of Jack ‘Spot’ is typical. Spot – whose real name was Comer – ran a race ring that specialised in fraud; when punters returned to collect their winnings, the bookie had absconded. In 1955, in Soho, a quarrel broke out between Spot and a bookmaker named Albert Dimes, a friend of a rival gang boss named Billy Hill. Spot produced a knife and chased Dimes into a fruit shop, slashing at him; in his excitement, he dropped the knife, and Dimes picked it up and slashed Spot. When the police arrived, Spot had fainted from loss of blood and Dimes had left in a taxi. At the trial, Spot insisted – against all the evidence – that Dimes was the aggressor, and received unexpected support from an eighty-eight-year-old retired clergyman named Basil Andrews. Andrews claimed that he had happened to be in Frith Street when the fight broke out, and saw Dimes draw the knife on Spot. It was only later, when he read about the case in the newspapers, that he decided to come forward out of a sense of fair play. His evidence was instrumental in getting Spot acquitted; but there was evidently some doubt in the jury’s mind, for Dimes was acquitted too. The British public was outraged by this verdict; how could two men who had slashed each other both be innocent? The Rev. Basil Andrews found himself the object of unwelcome attention, and when he let slip that he was frequently broke because of ‘harmless flutters in the sporting world’, suspicion increased. Finally, Andrews admitted that he had accepted a few pounds to testify in Spot’s favour. The three men accused of bribing him went to prison. Six months later, Spot was out walking with his wife when he was beaten to the ground with a crowbar and slashed with a razor. He preserved the underworld code of silence, insisting that he had no idea of who did it. But his wife named Billy Hill and several of his men. Two of these were arrested, and sentenced to seven years each. The British public was left with the vague impression that justice will always triumph in the end.

A case that took place in 1960 threw some doubt on that proposition. The manager of a Soho club, Selwyn Cooney, decided to pay a visit to the Pen Club in Duval Street, Stepney; he was accompanied by his girlfriend, the barmaid, Joan Bending. In the Pen Club, he was approached by a gangster named James Nash, who accused him of ‘having a go’ at his brother Ronnie. Cooney was knocked to the ground; his nose was broken and some teeth knocked out. Then two shots were fired. The doorman, Billy Ambrose, collapsed with a bullet in his stomach; Cooney was also shot. When the police arrived, he was lying dead on the pavement outside. Nash was nowhere to be found, but two other men, John Read and Joseph Pyle – who had helped Nash to beat up Cooney – were arrested.

The chief prosecution witness was to be Mrs Fay Sadler, part-owner of the Pen Club. But she vanished, and all attempts to locate her failed. Cooney’s friend John Simons had to be kept under constant police surveillance because the gangs were determined to silence him. His girlfriend, a twenty-year-old blonde named Barbara Ibbotson, had her face slashed in Soho. The prosecution pressed the judge to bring the trial forward because of the danger to witnesses; the same day, Barbara Ibottson was in her bath when three men broke into the flat, held her head under water, and slashed her face again. She fled from London. At the trial in April 1960, Simons testified that it was Nash who murdered Cooney; but Fay Sadler had still not appeared. Then, unexpectedly, the judge stopped the trial and discharged the jury; one of the jurors was later said to have discussed the case with a prisoner on remand. When the new trial opened, a surprise witness insisted that Joan Bending had been drunk at the time of the affray, and that Simons was in another bar. The charges against Read and Pyle were dropped, and James Nash was acquitted. All three were later charged with causing grievous bodily harm to Cooney; Nash received five years, and the others, eighteen months. Simons was later attacked and left bleeding from razor slashes. Fay Sadler reappeared after the trial, alleging that she had been ill. Cooney’s girlfriend, Joan Bending, was forced to flee from London; during the course of the next few years, she changed her address repeatedly. The general impression left by the case was that British justice had been slightly less than triumphant.

In 1956, when sentencing two gangsters for a knife attack, the judge remarked: ‘It sounds like the worst days of Prohibition in Chicago rather than London in 1956.’ The remark showed prescience. Although the police were still unaware of it, London already had two gangs who had consciously modelled themselves on the Mafia: the Richardsons and the Krays.

Charles Richardson, born in Camberwell in 1934, spent his first term in approved school when he was fourteen – the year in which his father deserted the family. In 1956, he set up the Peckford Scrap Metal Company in south London; it was, in fact, a front for receiving stolen goods. Richardson had considerable talent as a businessman, and could probably have made a fortune by legitimate means. Instead, he and his younger brother Eddie practised large-scale fraud. The method was to open a wholesale business and order goods from a manufacturer. These were promptly paid for. So were subsequent orders – each larger than the last. Finally, they would place an enormous order – for perhaps £20,000-worth of goods – and then disappear. The goods were then sold at cut rates, usually to market dealers.