Francis Davidson Fraser, known as “Mad” Frankie Fraser, was the scourge of prison governors and warders up and down Britain during the periods when he served a total of more than 40 years’ imprisonment. But by the time of his death at the age of 90 from complications following leg surgery, Fraser had become something of a minor celebrity. People shook his hand in the street, others kissed him or asked for his autograph and taxi drivers honked their horns.
Born near Waterloo station, central London, he was the fifth child of a poor family. His mother was of Norwegian-Irish stock and his father was half Native American. Both Frank and his sister, Eva, whom he adored, inherited their father’s features and his jet-black hair. The pair were the only ones of the children to embrace a life of crime.
At the age of five, Fraser, running in the road to beg for cigarette cards, was knocked down, and from his injuries he developed meningitis. Nevertheless he was good at sports, captaining the football team at St Patrick’s school, Southwark, and boxing as an amateur. His first conviction was for stealing cigarettes, and with the second he was sent to an approved school. In later life he would say that had there been an elder criminal member of the family to advise him, he would not have served his sentences in what was called the hard way.
From then on until the end of the 1980s, Fraser was more often in jail than not. Borstal was followed by prison, where in 1943 he met the influential London villain Billy Hill, for whom he worked on and off for more than a decade, culminating in his slashing of Hill’s rival Jack Spot in 1956 after the self-styled “kings of the underworld” had fallen out. Fraser received seven years.
Before then, Fraser had been involved in smash-and-grab raids and wages snatches. The raids seem often to have been left to chance, and he was particularly unfortunate with cars. After one snatch, he and his companion were arrested when their car would not start. After another, the car ran out of petrol in the Rotherhithe tunnel.
After Fraser’s release from the Spot sentence, he was courted by the Kray Twins and the Richardson gang. He chose the latter because they had taken sides on behalf of his sister’s husband, Tommy Brindle, who had received a heavy beating by the Rosa brothers from the Elephant and Castle. With the help of Hill and mafia interests, Fraser and Eddie Richardson established Atlantic Machines, a successful business placing one-armed bandits in clubs throughout Britain. The business came to an end in 1966 when a fight in a Catford night club, Mr Smith’s, left a Kray associate, Dickie Hart, dead, and Richardson and Fraser, who was charged with Hart’s murder, in prison. Fraser was acquitted but received five years for affray.
While serving this sentence, Fraser received 10 years for his part in the so-called Richardson torture trial. He was said to have pulled out the teeth of one of the victims with a pair of pliers. Throughout his life he denied the justice of this conviction, but he was happy to trade off it. At signing sessions of his books he was always willing to be photographed pretending to extract a tooth with pliers brought by the fan. He received a further five years when, in 1970, he was acquitted of incitement to murder but convicted of grievous bodily harm after he had led the Parkhurst prison riot the previous year. As a solicitor, I defended him in the trial following the Parkhurst riot and as a result wrote a number of books with him.
A constant troublemaker in prison, attacking governors and warders over perceived injustices which inevitably resulted in floggings, bread and water and the loss of remission, Fraser had by this time been certified insane on three occasions. The first came when he was in the army during the second world war, the second time when he was sent to Cane Hill psychiatric hospital in Coulsdon, Surrey, and the third when he was transferred from Durham prison to Broadmoor.
It was not that he thought he was Napoleon. He had an ungovernable temper and an inability to think through the undoubted consequences of his proposed actions. Once he said he would do something, he did it, and he despised others who backed down. Nevertheless his campaigns and, on the outside, those of Eva, did bring the attention of the general public to the unpalatable conditions in which prisoners served then their sentences.
Fraser was released in 1988 and almost immediately served a two-year sentence for receiving. On this release, he determined to write his memoirs. Mad Frank (1994), which went on to sell around 100,000 copies, was the first in a successful series. Possessed of a ready wit and good repartee, he followed this up with stage performances both in the East and West End, where he appeared with his then companion of 10 years, Marilyn Wisbey, the daughter of a Great Train Robber, Tommy Wisbey. In 1996 he was cast as the gangleader Pops Den in the film Hard Men, which premiered at the London film festival.
His new career took off and he was in regular demand as a radio and television pundit. He also ran a coach tour pointing out to a spectrum of customers the old criminal London. Always well turned out and ineffably polite and punctual, he had a large and appreciative audience, and one woman was so impressed she named her son after him. He was still touring clubs and pubs in 2011.
His wife, Doreen, whom he married in 1965, and who with Eva loyally toured the prisons to visit him, died in 1999.
A keen Arsenal supporter, Fraser had four sons, the first three of whom, Frank Jr, David and Patrick, followed to an extent in his footsteps. His fourth son, Francis, in Fraser’s joking words, “let me down” by having no criminal career at all.
• Francis Davidson Fraser, criminal, born 13 December 1923; died 26 November 2014
