i Editor's Letter: The demise of a Sixties monster
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Your support makes all the difference.Do speak ill of the dead. Not all of them are good eggs. Twenty-three years after newspapers first erroneously reported his death, when he was shot in the head outside a nightclub, today Frankie Fraser will receive the obituary treatment.
He was an appalling human being, once known as Britain’s most violent man for his work as a gangland enforcer, Fraser the Razor, “The Dentist” in the so-called Richardson Torture Gang. He used to carry a pair of pliers in his top suit pocket as a warning to the loose-tongued. His CV includes 40 years inside, multiple attacks on guards, leading the Parkhurst Prison riots, beating up executioner Albert Pierrepoint in Wandsworth (“the best thing I ever done”). Our report of his demise runs here.
I’ve tired of the romanticism attached to these Sixties monsters – the Krays, the Richardsons and Fraser were sociopaths recast as working-class folk heroes. Maybe they did all love their mums. Bury them and forget them. They deserve nothing better.
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