If there was ever any doubt that the British TV viewer is obsessed with gangland crime drama, a glance at this month’s schedules banishes it once and for all.
Riding high on BBC One is series two of The Gold, a programme revolving around the hunt to find the bullion lost in the infamous Brink’s-Mat robbery.
Its stablemate, This City Is Ours, tells the story of Liverpool crime boss Ronnie Phelan, who’s looking to retire, a decision that triggers a power struggle between his partner Michael Kavanagh and his ambitious son Jamie.
Meanwhile MobLand, which covers the increasingly violent battle between two rival family-run drug syndicates, the Harrigans and the Stevensons, has just been renewed for a second season.
What all three shows highlight is the way illegal activities initiated by the chief of a clan often drag in family members.
So how true is this in real life? To find out, I tracked down a time-served old lag of my own, Michael Emmett, 66.
On the face of it, Michael was doomed to a life of crime from the moment he emerged from the womb. His grandfather Charlie was so bright yet deranged that he was known as ‘the Devil on two sticks’. Indeed his inner demons eventually got the better of him and he ended up taking his own life.
But the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. One of Michael’s earliest memories of his father Brian dates back to the age of six when he saw the bloodied figure of a man bolting down the road near their home after he had been beaten to a pulp by his dear old dad.
Shortly afterwards, Michael was sexually abused by his female babysitter at the family’s flat in Stockwell, south London. It happened not once but multiple times and, in his own words, ‘wreaked havoc’ with his psyche.
By the age of 11, he was already a seasoned shoplifter, stealing makeup from Woolworths to gift to girls.
At 16, he had moved out of the family home into a flat owned by his half-brother Brian, who was doing time for armed robbery.
This newfound freedom fired the starting gun on a life of sex, drugs and rock and roll fuelled by small-time crime.
‘When I got involved with crime, to be honest with you, I loved it,’ Michael once admitted. ‘It was exciting. People say: “How can you like criminality?” I’m not saying I like the action of crime – I liked the feeling, the high it brought.’
Michael’s criminal socialisation increased as the years went by, but he stresses his dad never ‘taught him to steal’ and takes full responsibility for choosing the path he did.
During a holiday in Mojacar, Spain, when he was 18 he found himself smoking weed at a party with Gordon Goody – of Great Train Robbery fame – a man so debonair that the New York Times obituary of him said he ‘combined the rakishness of James Bond with the bravado of Jesse James’.
Michael’s penetration of British gangland’s ‘high society’ went up a notch when he began dating Tracy Foreman, the niece of notorious enforcer Freddie ‘Brown Bread Fred’ Foreman, who famously helped dispose of Jack McVitie’s body after he was stabbed by Reggie Kray at a party in north London.
But it was one night in 1978, when he was 23, Michael found himself at a murder scene. Sent by his mother to pick up his father from the Ranelagh Yacht Club – a hang-out for local gangsters better known as the ‘Dirty Den’ – he found himself in the presence of ‘every villain in West London’.
An argument broke out between gangsters Johnny Darke and Johnny ‘Biffo’ Bindon, best known for allegedly having an affair with Princess Margaret, that resulted in a knife fight.
While Darke made the first move, he came off worse when Bindon stabbed him in the spleen with a Bowie knife.
‘Darke died shortly afterwards,’ Michael later recalled. ‘Biffo survived and was later acquitted. But what astounded me was that I wasn’t frightened. Covered in blood, I’d just been devastated that my white boots were ruined. The real Michael didn’t care about the violence.’
Many criminals, Michael admitted, were very different to the clean-shaven, aftershave-wearing American mobsters his dad engaged with in the course of what Michael believed were cannabis deals.
‘The New Yorkers were made men who lived by the sword, died by the sword. They were about themselves, no artificial ego jumping out,’ he says.
‘Although I met many London criminals who were very disciplined and organised at their work and committed some serious crimes, we were built differently. We had the same rules and regulations, but we didn’t have a governing body.
‘My dad wouldn’t kiss the Mafia’s hands. We were a little more self-centred, did what we wanted, whereas the Mafia were principled. If you look at Ronnie [Kray], he wanted to be like the New Yorkers but his schizophrenia wouldn’t allow it.’
As time went on, Michael became one of Britain’s most notorious drug smugglers of the 1980s and 90s, But it was in the early 90s that his drug-use spiralled into full-blown addiction. He was even freebasing cocaine – a process that involves putting highly concentrated crystals into a glass pipe, heating them and inhaling the resulting vapour.
In a business where the most basic piece of advice is, ‘Don’t get high on your own supply’, Michael had broken a cardinal rule.
In 1993, he, his father and two other men were arrested by Customs and Excise officers after unloading four tons of cannabis resin from a boat moored at Bideford Quay in North Devon.
They were convicted of trying to import a consignment worth £13million and he and his father were both sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison, where they served time alongside Reggie Kray.
When I first met Michael, I assumed we’d both find it a rather awkward affair. After all, I’m the 27-year-old son of a policeman – whose father was one too – raised in a law-abiding, middle-class home.
But when we met at his favourite Italian restaurant in Notting Hill, he couldn’t have been more kind and welcoming. Although he refuses to share ‘kiss and tell’ stories of others, he was open to talking about his escape from the depths of the London underworld in the hopes of inspiring others.
It turns out Michael hasn’t touched drugs or alcohol for two decades and, although he describes himself as a ‘work in progress’, he’s now a well-known figure in addiction recovery circles and an important figure in British church life.
He helped spread Alpha – a ten-week introduction to Christianity that has now been completed by 32million people across 100 countries – in prisons, where the course has reached over 250,000 inmates worldwide.
Redemption came in the unlikely form of the Page Three model-turned-Christian convert, Samantha Fox. It was Ms Fox, a friend of Michael’s then-girlfriend Daniella, who invited her to attend a service at the Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), a popular evangelical Anglican church in South Kensington.
Daniella was instantly won over and when she told Michael about her new church he asked the prison chaplain if a team from HTB could come and visit.
The experience proved to be an instant success. ‘There was a real sense of spiritual healing. Everyone had an experience with the Holy Spirit. All 20 inmates, just in 20 different ways,’ Michael wrote in his memoir.
His conversion was not without the odd hiccup. He succumbed to drink and drugs at various points during his recovery, but he stuck at it.
He even later introduced Reggie Kray, who he met during a stretch at HMP Maidstone, to the Alpha course.
Later, Reggie Kray would even pray for Michael when he learned he and his then wife Daniella had split up while he was in prison. ‘Reggie always had a “God bless” to say, but I reignited his faith,’ Michael said.
They say there’s no honour among thieves but, when they reform – as Michael’s example so vividly proves – there can be a great deal.
And it’s no wonder that, as today’s rash of TV series shows, we can’t get enough of their behaviour behind closed doors.
