What I've Learned After Decades Drinking with London's Criminals

Professor Dick Hobbs is a fairly unique criminologist, in that he’s spent the past few decades carrying out his research into criminality not from a desk, but in the working class pubs and cafes of his birthplace, London’s East End.

Hobbs’ new book, The Business: Talking with Thieves, Gangsters and Dealers, details the years he’s spent chatting to and observing London’s arch villains, duckers and divers. He’s seen the criminal underworld change from one founded on basic needs, brute force and simple entrepreneurship, to an “overworld” where gangster suits and jellied eels have been exchanged for branded leisurewear and cocaine.

I met up with Hobbs to have a chat about the changing face of London’s crime world.

VICE: How did you get “involved” in the East End criminal world? 
Professor Dick Hobbs: As a kid I saw two worlds in the East End. I was brought up in a law-abiding family. My mum and dad were damaged by the bombing, rationing and chaos of World War Two. My dad was away at war and my mum was in the factories at night. Lots of people just wanted security after the war. One thing that represented insecurity was the police. My family, like most working class families, had experience of the police, and it wasn't good. Many of them were violent ex-servicemen. I was brought up to avoid the police and keep my head down. 

At the same time, after the war, the East End was rocking, the pubs were great. The docks were full of goods, and that generated so much crime and theft. I noticed, when I walked down the street with my grandad, that the people who stopped and talked to him looked different from the people who spoke to mum and dad. They were well dressed, had big overcoats, they always gave me coins. I later learned they were street bookies and thieves. My grandfather’s world was a tougher world, where people did take risks, where people took liberties and sometimes got away with it. 

As I got older, I could see the violence, the stolen goods – it was everywhere, in an everyday way. The adult world was rife with crime. People I’d been to school with were getting nicked for armed robbery, stolen goods, running prostitution. I went to night school and trained as a school teacher while earning money in a builders’ merchants. I remember when mixer taps first came in, everyone was nicking them. I went to university in my thirties and read academic stuff about working class culture and crime, and I thought, ‘I can do better than this.’ I started to write about what I knew and speak to the criminals I knew. I never pretended to be part of their world, but I spoke their language. 

You’ve been drinking with criminals most of your life. What is the main difference between the public perception of criminals and the reality?
There is a perception that criminals are motivated by different things than non-criminals. But like everyone else, most of these guys want to earn a living, they want to have a good time and they want to look after their families. The main difference is that they don’t really want to get up in the morning. Most of the professional villains I’ve known don’t like to work. They don't rate ordinary people who get up and go to work for a pittance and a pension. They want more than that, and they want it now. They see nine to five workers as mere punters. 

I spent some time with “Mad” Frankie Fraser, and he was quite clear that there were two kinds of people: professional criminals like him, who lived by a kind of samurai code, and then your “mug punters”. And he didn't really have to bother with them – he wouldn't lay a hand on a mug punter. I was a mug punter, he disregarded me. 

But he really disliked clerks – they were “pencil pushers” in his eyes, people who sat behind desks. He really despised them. Frankie was an extreme professional criminal, there were very few like him. 

Over the time you’ve been studying crime, what are the biggest changes you’ve seen?
One of the big changes is drugs. The post-war crime scene was based on theft or extortion. I was brought up in an environment where there was an awful lot of both of them, particularly theft. If you were going to be a villain, you stole a lot. The stolen goods market as it was does not exist anymore. If you can walk down the high street and go to Primark to buy a pair of jeans for £5, why take the risk of nicking a lorry-load? 

Drugs introduced an emphasis on trading relationships, rather than stealing. The ability to pick up a parcel for £5 and sell it for £10, simple as that. Drugs came along at a time when communities were breaking down and working class jobs were going. Villains, up to that point, had been quite conservative people – a lot of them had a picture of the Queen up on their wall. They told me they “don’t believe in drugs”, but six months later they’d be nicked for bringing in a lorry=load of cannabis. 

Anyone can get involved in the drugs trade. Before, if you wanted to get seriously involved in crime, there used to be a crime apprenticeship – you had to prove yourself, maybe by serving a prison sentence. Now, you’ve got kids barely into their teens dealing drugs, because it’s easy: you buy drugs from one person, sell them for a small profit to another person, and you’re a drug dealer. Anyone can be an international drug dealer. You’ve got £10k, you go to Amsterdam and come back with a load of pills. It’s as easy as that. 

There’s also been the breaking down of white working class communities into more cosmopolitan communities. Some within them bring criminal opportunities linked to their place of origin. Everyone’s got a slice. It’s not really about nationality, it’s about the experience of being an expat. Expat communities, like the British in Spain, are bonded together by language and culture. That’s ideal for those who want to generate crime, because there’s trust and family links.

The criminal “underworld” is finished. Criminals hanging out in their own clubs, dressing in suits, living in a certain area, a criminal lifestyle, with their own way of speaking. It’s gone. Instead, we’ve got an “overworld”. That’s what’s important, it’s where the money is.

What is that overworld? 
It’s about the legitimate world and international trade in drugs, guns and contraband. It’s criminals using the mechanisms of the overworld, such as legitimate transport and legitimate people, like lorry drivers and warehousemen. 

If you want to recruit someone into an illegal enterprise, you are looking for straight people running a straight business. They've got premises, a reputation, letter headings, transport. All of this is exploited by people with an ambition to make money. 

Then the money has to be cleaned in legitimate enterprises. It’s a mutant form of enterprise that’s not logged in an underworld. As the UN said after the 2008 economic crash, the financial markets were kept liquid by all the illegal money. We are reliant on it. 

One example, a Turkish restaurateur, straight as a die, liked to gamble, got into a bit of debt. He was offered the chance to earn £2k a month washing money. That went up to £10k a month, and he was making so much he wanted to invest in the business, and he was in. 

In the crime overworld, they don’t see themselves as criminals, but as businessmen. Even so, it’s hard for them to get out entirely, because they leave a dirty trail behind them. I know people who’ve not committed a criminal act for 15 years and they’re still detaching themselves from that role. 

How do villains deal with the constant threat of violence or jail?
Most of the them don't live very long. There aren't many left of those I spoke to in the 1980s, they’re dead. 

From being killed? 
No. Ill health. In the films they get shot, in real life they die of cirrhosis. The life of drinking and smoking and chaos catches up on them. A lot of the old criminals I know end up sitting on the sofa with a bottle of supermarket spirits and a large pack of Old Holborn. Booze takes these people away. People go on about drugs, but it’s booze. That buzzy lifestyle, it’s attractive for most people with straight lives. But day in, day out, it's not the same, it never stops. 

The criminal lifestyle was unbelievably unhealthy. Where are you going to meet to plan a robbery? In a pub. Where are you going to eat? In a greasy spoon. You’re not going to meet up for a Perrier water. It’s up at 3AM in the morning because you’re meeting someone in a lay-by with a lorry-load of gear. They’re delayed, so you go and have a double egg breakfast. Delayed again, so you wait around in the pub and have six pints of lager. Eventually you’ve got rid of the gear and you're back in the pub – wahey, I've got some money and it’s another six pints, and it all starts again the next day with a big breakfast. 

It’s like the latter stages of Goodfellas, where he’s getting fat, with the helicopter, the bad diet, the drugs, the paranoia… it’s bad for the heart. The liver’s hardening up, all those breakfasts, the meat pies, the lager, the coke, the pressure, the tension. You can’t do that for 30 years. You ain't going to last, a lot of them are gone. 

What happened to the children and grandchildren of the big East End criminals? Are they still in crime?   
There was one category of criminals who made lots of money in the 70s, 80s and 90s, and they were absolutely bent on making sure their kids didn't do crime. They sent them to private school. The daughter of Eddie Richardson [a south London gang boss, who with his brother Charlie fought with the Kray twins] went to ballet school. The son of Freddie Foreman [an associate of the Kray twins, who was twice tried for murder] is now an esteemed actor. 

Some of these families have moved on. I do get stories from cab drivers about sons and daughters of gangsters who are snorting too much coke, always drunk, basically spoilt kids. But they can’t do what their dads did, because what their dads did is not available anymore. 

The big London gangs of the modern era, such as the Adams family, what’s happening to them?  
The flotsam and jetsam of these big names are still around, they haven't been wiped out. They've got older, probably invested money wisely and don't need to do it anymore. It’s not like The Godfather, [where] once you’re in, you’re in for life. They don’t see themselves like that. They see themselves as money-makers, and when they've made their money, if they can get out, they will get out. 

I’m wary of the big names. I’ve always concentrated my research on the “poor bloody infantry”, as I call them. The everyday criminals. That big name may serve you well as a criminal, you may know that family, but you won't necessarily be a member. However, that engagement with a big criminal name could mark you in police intelligence as being a member of a cartel. One man I know, a ducker and diver – he stole from lorries and warehouses, but then he got old and had some heart attacks and he wasn’t making any money. Someone from one of the big names offered him a job in a money counterfeit operation. He just pulled the lever and pressed the foil into £20 notes, for £3,000 a week. But the group were under surveillance and they got nicked. At 58, he went to prison for the first time and got five years for being “a lieutenant in an organised crime group”.  

There’s a lot in the media now about teenage drug runners. Have children always been involved in organised crime? 
Let’s not get too dewy-eyed about the past. There’s always been kids involved in crime, although the way they’re involved is slightly different. If you look at Frankie Fraser, at the age of nine he was working for the Sabinis [an Italian gang from London] at the race courses. At primary school, I knew kids aged ten involved in selling stolen goods in pubs. They were in and out with boxes of stolen clothes, everyone was laughing. It was not a dark world of child labour. Were they exploited? To an extent, yeah. Were they enjoying it? Yeah. Did it give them a buzz? Yeah. Now, there is a real demand for child labour in developing drug markets. But kids have always been exploited by older criminals. 

There’s an epidemic of rival teenagers killing each other on the streets of London. Is that something you ever saw?
A guy I knew was 19 when he got killed in a fight by a glass on the jaw, which went into his jugular, and he died on floor of the pub. Another young guy I knew was shot. In pubs there were a lot of knife and razor fights. There’s a church hall in Plaistow where I remember a massive razor fight. It never got reported. But, 40 years later, at the same church hall, a young boy was stabbed to death and it was all over the national media. We are more aware and less tolerant of violence now. But I think it has got worse – it wasn’t so deadly back then. Back then, at the age of 22, most young men had settled down, they got a job, got married and became straight members of society.

What is East End crime in 2021?
Well, the rest of the country has caught up with the East End – that kind of entrepreneurship, doing deals, ducking and diving. There used to be a difference between working class culture in Sheffield and the East End, but now all the old industries are gone up north, they are ducking and diving like anyone else.  Everyone is encouraged to be an entrepreneur. 

If you want to see the old East End – the language, the style – you go to Surrey, Basildon, Essex, the Medway towns in Kent. Nowadays, it’s not about dominating territory, it’s about dominating markets. The only people fighting over territory now are kids. People who are making real money couldn't give a monkeys about territory, they are in the Cayman Islands.