Gangsters, Guns & Me - Now I'm in Eastenders, but once I was on the run. This is my true story. Jamie Foreman
other, and that’s all that mattered.
My routine didn’t change much after our move, but Mum soon sensed my lack of enthusiasm for being a dayboy at Christ’s College. She was willing to take the strain of finding the money for my school fees, but only if I could look her in the eye and say it was worth the trouble. Christ’s College had been a true education, and the school was so helpful and supportive of me through everything that had happened with Dad. Still, I’d simply lost interest, and had also been bunking off, so I made the decision to leave the school that had meant so much to me. It was time to go. A time for new beginnings.
It was suggested that I go to the local comprehensive in Dulwich, but there was no way I was going to do that. It sounds terrible, but I didn’t like the look of the kids I saw coming in and out of the place. Me, a working-class kid, had turned into a right little snob. The fact that they didn’t do the sports I was into was also a real turn-off. I was 14 years old, I’d been through a fuck of a lot and quite simply I didn’t think I had much to gain from the place. So I decided to take my chances, bide my time and see what life might have to offer elsewhere.
After I quit school I spent a lot of time being the man of the house, helping Mum out with this and that and taking my sister to school. Once I’d dropped Danielle off at Dulwich Hamlet Primary each morning, I suddenly found I had a lot of time on my hands. I’d hang about and my mind would wander. I’d daydream about what I might start doing for a living, but I’d daydream more about my dad.
The more I thought about him, the more I started to wonder just who Freddie Foreman was. I’d heard rumours about what went down, whisperings about what kind of a man my father was when he wasn’t being a father, but I’d spent so many years being protected from the details. Now I was a teenager, my mind became more curious to know the truth, whatever it was.
One day I decided to start finding out, so I went to Brixton Library to do a bit of detective work.
From the moment Dad had been arrested, I’d been told many things by many people: Freddie Foreman was innocent, he’d been fitted up, the authorities had been trying to bring him down for years and finally they’d managed it. I believed what I was told – I heard it all from my nearest and dearest and had no reason to doubt them. Not until I started sniffing around in the library, that is. What I discovered changed everything.
According to the newspapers, my dad was a ‘monster’, as guilty as sin. At the library, I spent hour after hour poring over acres of newspaper reports kept on microfilm, reading anything pertaining to him. If I’d ever had any doubts about whether my dad was innocent or guilty, well, just taking in what they said about him put them to bed. I sat there in awe of what I was reading; it was nothing short of a revelation. My dad was a South London gangland boss. A killer at the centre of the most powerful crime organisation in Britain. He was accused of being the ‘Man Who Held The Key’ in some of the Kray twins’ most nefarious deeds. Fucking hell! I knew my dad was a ‘face’, sure, but until then I’d had no idea how massively he had been involved in the whole thing. The way the papers put it, he sounded less like my father and more like the Godfather. He was Britain’s Al Capone.
As I devoured every column inch available, the picture of him grew bigger and bigger. Dad’s trial had been part of a huge showdown between the establishment, the police and the Krays, and at the time it was the longest trial in British criminal history. It ended in my father being convicted of disposing of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie’s body. That was the ‘accessory to murder’ bit. Jack was a troublesome member of the twins’ firm who was brutally stabbed to death by Reggie Kray.
The papers were certainly right about Dad knowing the Krays – I vividly remembered Ronnie and Reggie babysitting me when I was small. From time to time Dad had left me with them at their East End snooker hall when he had business over that way. They were always so lovely to me, and made sure I was well looked after. That was my experience of them, but I didn’t need Brixton Library to tell me the Krays weren’t angels to everyone.
Everyone knew the twins were notorious criminals, but if you were on the right side of them you were all right. Being who I was meant I certainly was. To my dad they were allies and friends. Dad was very much his own man, but he’d helped the twins on occasion, mainly out of loyalty to one of his best friends, Charlie Kray. Charlie was a lovely, lovely man. He certainly didn’t have the same dark, dangerous nature of his brothers. Anybody who knew him will tell you that. Nevertheless, he was unjustly tarred with the same brush. I am proud to have had the honour of reading the eulogy at his funeral. I loved Charlie and miss him very much.
After years of being kept in the dark, I suddenly had the whole picture of who my dad was, how he was perceived by the public and what he had done. Technically speaking, I’d been lied to by those close to me. Dad wasn’t innocent; he hadn’t been fitted up. He had done some terrible things, and that was that. But I wasn’t angry about the lies, because right away I understood that the truth had been kept from me for my own protection. Those ‘lies’ were born out of love. At the age of ten there’s no way I could have dealt with the facts I was now facing at 14. No way at all. God knows how that little boy would have reacted to the truth about his father.
But how did that boy react at 14? Did he feel angry, ashamed, all messed up? Was he thrown into a terrible dilemma? Did he hate his father for the things he’d done, for the fact that he’d put himself in a position where he had been labelled a ‘monster’?
Not guilty, dear reader. Not guilty.
My father wasn’t just the man I thought he was – a good, loving father. In my young eyes, what I’d found out made Dad more of a man than I’d thought he was. I already had so much adoration for my dad and, if I’m honest, discovering how notorious he was only strengthened that feeling. The press might have condemned Freddie Foreman’s actions, but there’s no denying that they created a certain mystique around him. Whatever villainy he’d been up to, my dad was presented as a hugely powerful figure at the top of his game, a man both revered and feared in many echelons of society.
The public has always been obsessed with criminals – gangsters in particular – and rightly or wrongly the baddies have been romanticised in films and literature since time immemorial. They go from villains to heroes to legends. Perhaps there’s a part in all of us that lives out deeply hidden dreams of power and lawlessness through such characters, I don’t know. At 14, I’d seen plenty of gangster films, and to discover that my dad was the real deal undoubtedly gave me a buzz. When it comes to that 14-year-old boy, I think he was rather glad his dad was a man at the top of his particular tree.
But my reaction was more complex than a schoolboy fantasy come true. I suppose some might say I had two choices: I could either demonise Dad for who and what he was, or I could idolise him. Well, if it was one or the other, there was no way I was going to write my own dad off as an evil man. In fact, it didn’t even occur to me that he was anything of the sort. To demonise a man who had never shown me anything but love and kindness would have been absurd. Besides, I understood that, in the world my father moved in, certain deeds went with the territory. There were men out there who he might have hurt – killed even – but those men would have just as happily got him first.
As far as Dad’s guilt went, perversely I wanted to believe he was guilty. It helped me. To see my own dad suffering for years in prison, to feel my mother’s and sister’s pain, and to deal with my own demons would have been so much harder had I genuinely believed he was innocent. If he was guilty, at least there was some reason for all this misery.
And it had been misery. Not that I blamed Dad. He did what he had to do and was willing to pay the price. The rules of his world. My dad was my hero, no matter what he’d done. In his absence, I loved him more than ever and was willing to pay my price for him not being around. Perhaps I even romanticised him a touch too much – nobody’s perfect, after all. But back then, with Dad away, all I had to go on were my memories of his strength and kindness during those visits, and the wonderful stories I was told about him, his loyalty to his friends, the people he had helped over the years. Dad was larger than life to me and I adored him all the more for it.
It