Freddie fraser
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I Once Met Mad Frankie Fraser
By Jim White
He was sitting at the bar, and hadn’t moved all evening. Small, bullet-eyed, his hair slicked back, he was dressed in banker’s pinstripe. He sat nursing a vodka, holding court. A succession of young, clever metropolitans were lining up to speak to him. When it was their turn for a word, you could see them lean forward to catch his slow, light wisp of a voice, then rock back in sycophantic laughter. They would then go off and re-find their mates, tell them that they had just had a chat with a gangland legend, that they had just met Mad Frankie Fraser.
It was 1995 and I had written a book. To launch it, the publishers were hosting a party. It wasn’t clear how Mad Frankie had heard about it; he had probably come along with his friend Willie ‘Henry Root’ Donaldson. But nobody was going to turn him away. This, after all, was the guy who had spent 42 years inside for a catalogue of grotesque crimes. This was a man who boasted that he had pulled the teeth from rivals with a pair of pliers. Sure, Frankie could come in and enjoy the free bar.
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The story of one London’s most notorious criminal figures has been depicted in a new tell-all biography that promises to go beneath the folklore of bank heists and torture.
‘Mad Frank & Sons’, by author, former Sunday Times and Daily Mail reporter, Beezy Marsh, has been described by the late Frankie Fraser’s son David as “the real truth” and “not like any other book about us”.
Spanning 100 years, the book offers first-hand accounts of the Frasers’ relationship with the Kray and Richardson families. It started off as a memoir, but Beezy felt compelled to take on searching interviews with every family member she could contact “including the women”.
“It’s very different from any of our other books. It’s very violent and very sad in parts. Some of it is hilarious with very dark humour,” said 64-year-old David, who grew up with his brother Patrick in Mason Street, Walworth.
“There’s a lot of new stuff no one has heard before, and that’s why we wanted to release this book.”
Speaking to the News about her interviews with Frankie as he struggled with alzheimer’s in a Nunhead care
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Frankie Fraser
English gangster
Francis Davidson Fraser[1] (13 December 1923 – 26 November 2014),[2] better known as "Mad" Frankie Fraser, was an English gangster who spent 42 years in prison for numerous violent offences.[3][4]
Early life
Francis Davidson Fraser was born on Cornwall Road in Waterloo, London,[5][6][7][8] the youngest of five children of a partly Native American seaman and an Irish-Norwegian washerwoman. He grew up in poverty in a Roman Catholic household, where he learned to recite prayers in Latin.[9] At the age of five, he moved with his family to a flat on Walworth Road, Elephant and Castle.[8]
Although his parents were not criminals, Fraser turned to crime aged 10 with his sister Eva, to whom he was close.[10] He was a deserter during the Second World War, escaping from his barracks on several occasions. It was during the war that he first became involved in serious crime, with the blackout and rationing, combined with the lack of
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