Befriending Reggie Kray In Prison - Raphael Rowe

[Music] i remember i wanted to ask you a bit about the the craze you said that you mentioned you you you knew them in prison or you knew what was it reggie you know reggie yeah i met ronnie when he came to visit reggie in maidstone prison where where i was with reggie i was sort of banged on this side of the landing regime was where you were opposite me so we were banged up opposite each other for about three and a half years so i met ronnie when he came to visit reggie after i think it was their mother died or someone died in their family so they were brought together one of the very first times right so how long how close were you to to reggie well like you say close i mean um he'd come into myself and have conversations there were some conversations i wouldn't repeat here but i'm going to write it in my book because get that promo in but i knew him well you know he was an old diving man to be honest with you you know he'd been in prison for 35 years and and i'd sometimes walk around the yard with him and i organized the charity football match with him and i remember reggie um for example in prison at the time one of the issued bits of garments that we wore with these blue and white striped shirts you know so today i think they give prisoners sort of grey track suits but back in my day you'd be issued with a blue and white famous shirt with hmp stamped on it so i had a cousin who played for brentford football team at the time and he brought in his team and the manager because they wanted to see reggie crane not necessarily play [ __ ] football with me but it was it was a charity event and um i had reggie sign all all the shirts um so i knew him well enough um and you know he was a man who you know he could pick out innocent and not innocent prisoners not that he cared about that oh wow but i was i was um i was impressed by the fact that in one of his last books before he died he did write in his book that when he met me um i was probably the only prisoner that he'd ever met who he truly believed was innocent so not in them words but you know it's an accolade when you've got a prisoner of that statue sort of declaring that you know he's seen him all heard them all but he believed me and he even took the trouble to write in his book and i think that was just after i was released and then obviously when he died i went to his funeral because i'd mingled a mix with all those gangsters you know i was never on their side don't get me wrong yeah but you know i come out of myself sitting on the landing having a cup of tea and they'd all be around me and i was welcomed in the black clip the white click the gangsta click because i was not one of them and i didn't conform to who they were or what they were yeah um so yeah i i got to know him very well you know he's a man um you know it came into my cell on one occasion i'm not going to give you too much detail but he came into my cell on one occasion cried his eyes out really sat down there cried his eyes out so you know so he he felt we knew each other enough that he could come and confine in me you know this is a gangster that he has this mythical reputation about him i had a lot of time for him a lot of respect for him not because he was reggie craig the grandstar but because he was a man who survived those many years in prison and and you know i look at people like that's how i'm not to [ __ ] be here for that long because he was a diver in old man yeah and when i say diver in old man i mean he was someone who had been confined in herself for 35 years or more and so he shuffled around the prison you know he was still as sharp as a razor in the sense that you know he'd always wear clean clothes this gold chain around his neck um he was into sort of you know these kind of wishing well web things that you had hanging so he'd have them all hanging from his cell as if like dream catchers i think they well you can get them in prison you get lots of things in prison when you're in the deep dark bellies of the prison you can get a lot of things i mean it progressed over the years i mean as i say when i first went it was a piss pot it was a cardboard table and chair yeah over the years you can accumulate things and prisons progressed in that they introduced sanitation so you could piss and [ __ ] in a toilet in your cell as opposed to going down the landing and queuing up and waiting for every other [ __ ] to fill it up so so yeah things did progress and reggie had one of those cells where he had everything in he said and i'm not talking about luxuries i mean you're talking about a small nine by six full of things that he'd get sent in from people you know i go out on visits for example the visiting hall so we all go into the same visiting and then you'd have all wonders of celebrities coming up to visit him really yeah who would come to visit him simply because they wanted to be touched by reggie craig wow sometimes it was the wannabe criminals yeah you know um and and sometimes it was people were writing books or something but reggie was he was it was a sharp man who i i truly believe should have been released to to live the rest of his life outside because he wasn't a threat he didn't have you know he didn't have the pulling power of the gangster i mean he was locked up in the 60s yeah you know he died in prison or he was released just before he died i think he died in norwich actually from where he might have done yeah if i've got the right one because obviously i get the two mixed quite quite a lot is it was it did i guess because the celebrity i was going to ask you whether or not he was aware of his like how famous he or infamous he was yeah he played up to it did he yeah of course he did i mean he was he wasn't somebody who kind of stood on the landings and puffed his chest out he's too old for that but but he recognized he always looked to i thought exploit the situation because you know you could earn no money in prison you can't earn money in prison so someone wants to write a book about it about him he'd welcome that person somebody was offering an opportunity to sell his t-shirts he's welcome those people when people made a lot of money out of him he very got he got very little of that i i i think um but yeah i think i think initially and i didn't know him here as a young man when he was first in the prison but in the dying days when i did know him and i met him not just in one prison but you know i we kind of crossed paths in other prisons as as well um and there are stories about him that i can't share with you now but i'm going to share in my book but but he's you know um he earned a lot of respect in prison but he also lost a lot of respect in prison because of what he become and the way he conducted himself on occasion well negatively it depends how you look at it yeah you know it depends on what your perspective is about people and who they are and what what you believe i suppose people like reggie craig he had a reputation of being this notorious gangsta from this twin and there were films made about in legends and all this kind of thing um but the reality from what i saw with my own eyes and what i heard with my own ears um lots of other prisoners were exposed to that too um and some didn't take to it kindly you know what and what they witnessed was he a bit of a bit of a strange character because i've watched a few like movies that depict him and stuff and obviously they dramatized that to sell tickets but he seemed a bit a bit odd was he a bit odd or was he a straightforward london gangster you see what you get it depends what you define as a straightforward london gangster you know he he's not like all the other gangsters in the sense that they've done some time when out might have done something else and ended up back in prison like foreman or some of these other uh sort of notorious gangsters with reputations he's a man who spent many many years in prison so of course he's going to be a bit strange and behave in a particular way you know you couldn't have a a straight conversation like i am with you right now with reggie for too long because his mind would wander and he'd give her off over there and do something not because he was mentally insane yeah or because he couldn't hold the conversation but he lost interest quite quickly and that's the repercussions of a prison cell i mean it happened to me it still happens to me you know so you wander off in a different direction and i've been allowed you know i've got my freedom back and i've sort of taken in new memories and thoughts but he's you know we're confined to a prison cell and prison conversations for 35 years i mean what do you talk about after two years you know you've done all the talking you can talk about your memories on the outside now you're just talking about what goes on in prison and the fact is we're all seeing the same things what the [ __ ] you want to talk about that's true i've never thought about that yeah well you know when we did an episode a few weeks back where we we basically did an episode where it was like what would we do if we were stranded on a desert island if you could take one person with you blah blah blah i said didn't i i think it would take three years of living with somebody who's super interesting before they get [ __ ] boring and that's based on nothing yeah i'd say it's shorter really i'd say it's you know based on my experience of being in prison and finding people interesting initially once i told you their story six times dude times 15 times like reggie for [ __ ] sake man have you have you seen um the the film legend like tom hardy yeah how accurate is that portrayal i i i i on the outside i don't know because i didn't know him i wasn't even born when he ended up in prison i can only reflect on on on him as a man that i met in prison i'm not going to talk about he's i what i see what i hear i believe that's me and you know his authentic and and that's what i base my relationship on with someone like reggie craig based on our relationship when i say our relationship you know our acquaintance in prison at the time that i knew him he wasn't a mate of mine that would sit down and smoke a joint together or anything like that he had influence in prison but it wasn't a fearful influence it wasn't like oh really no it wasn't a fearful infant people didn't fear him he didn't have an army of prisoners around him prepared to do his dirty work that gone long time ago i suspect that might have been something in the early 70s when he was first in prison and was still a bit of a box i mean he still fancied himself as a boxer even in his 70s he would go out onto the exercise yard and he'd stand there with his shirt off you know he's got this whole man's body but still still looking someone said that about me the other day actually when they watched his netflix series they said nice body but it's an old man's body now oh sure but he'd go out on the exercise yard in his little kind of skimpy shorts if you like no top on and he'd bounce around sort of sparring in thin air sometimes you know we'd all do it we'd all have some pads and and stuff and we'd go into a room like this that gets really hot in the laundry room and we'd spa you know a way of working out getting a sweat up and he'd often take part in that and he still had a grip like a lion you know punched like a sledgehammer you know even when he was aging you know yeah and he just had that he had that aura around him where people respected him at least initially you know and then as people knew people would come into the prison you know they'd be in or and they'd watch him and they that's reggie craig but they'd say that about other prisoners who were notorious at the time whose names you know some of them were notorious for really bad reasons right um people would say that but after a while when you've seen it five ten times you don't even give it a second glance and he was just one of those it must be weird because he must have been high up in the kind of prison hierarchy sort of thing to start with when you go in and then over the years you get the new fitter younger men coming you see that sort of that foothold on it crumble away you do and it's really about respecting i mean they still respect him because of the reputation that he's had and this hierarchy that you talk about in the prisons that i was and existed to a certain extent but it was really about money it was about if you're a gangster on the outside and you know loosely use the term gangster but if you're somebody who's making good money on the outside you know importing traffic in drugs then you've got money so when you're in prison that buys you a lot you know it buys you a lot of influence you know not not in terms of protection power or anything like that but it just means that you've got a little bit more money in your canteen which means you can buy more tobacco which you can then use as contraband to trade and that just brings you power it means you get more i don't know nice biscuits or [ __ ] custard creams but it is as trivial as that yeah because you don't have the luxuries i mean i tell you something when i was in with reggie and a couple of other gangsters who were banged up next door to him it was the first time i saw a quantity of drugs that i'd never seen before in my life and this was in prison a maximum prison and i remember the guy was banged up two doors me so i was and say i was in free reggie was opposite me and then you had a gangster on the right of him a a sort of wife killer i suppose next to me and then some other kind of prisoner and i remember the other prisoner stephen was his name i remember him coming into my cell on one occasion with a sainsbury's carrier bag full of cannabis it was just so much i'd never seen a big lump it was like bulky out now prisoner didn't smuggle that in you know that's the influence that people who have money can have in prison so they pay a guard and guard brings it in and then it gets chopped up by the smaller prisoners and then it's distributed around the prison for a quarter of tobacco or an extra packet of wow biscuits and when he came into my cell and he was terrified because he i remember him coming in with this sainsbury bag full of cannabis and saying he didn't know what to do with it and so i sort of said you need to chop it up into small pieces you know like two pound deals five pound deals and then just plant it around the prison convince as many people as you can who you will pay maybe a little half an ounce or something to look after it um wow did going back to reggie quickly did he did he draw things did he i've heard that he like used to draw a lot of things yeah i've got a few of those things i mean he what he would often do um it it this was these kind of famous thing if yeah if you like so there would often be a picture of him and his brother posing as boxers you know in their younger days and i've got a couple of these myself where he he he'd come and he'd give you these old black and white printed you know off of a printer photograph with his signature on there so you say to my dear friend raphael from reggie craig and he's in his scruffled writing now if you don't and they're not used to his writing you probably couldn't read it because again divering and the same with his writing um but yeah he did used to to draw but that was more charlie bronson charlie bronson i remember when he sent me a copy of his book and he did some very dark drawings you know he's famous for his very dark bloody kind of drawing bit like darley type things you know weird kind of things um that reminds me actually i lent the book to a friend and he's never given me [Music] you

Channel: Happy Hour Podcast

Views: 718,495

Keywords: jaackmaate, podcast, happy, hour, jaack, maate, happyhourpodcast, jackmate, jaackmate, jackmaate, jhhp, happy hour raphael rowe, jaackmaate raphael rowe, happy hour prisoner, happy hour, raphael rowe worlds toughest prisons, raphael rowe reggie kray, reggie kray in prison, raphael rowe befriending reggie kray, befriending reggie kray in prison, kray twins prison

Id: 6dBN5RbNnuM

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020