The authorities called Jimmy Moody a hired gun. Six foot and eighteen stone, he was an enforcer for the Richardsons, a friend to the Krays and Frankie Fraser's closest ally. He opened armoured vans with a chainsaw, went over the wall at Brixton with an IRA bomber, and stayed free for thirteen years. People who knew him say you could not cross him.
Looe to Camberwell
James Alfred Moody was born on 27 February 1941 in Looe, a fishing town in Cornwall, where his mother, Rosina Hart, had been sent to escape the bombing. Back in London, he left school without a single exam pass. What he had instead was a reputation.
Scrap metal in the East End slum clearances took him across the river to Camberwell and to Charlie and Eddie Richardson, who ran protection, car park fraud and stolen goods and needed men who could settle an argument. Other criminals called Moody the hardest man in London. Detectives called him extremely professional and extremely intimidating.
Mr Smith's, March 1966
On 7 March 1966 Eddie Richardson was drinking at Mr Smith's and the Witchdoctor on Rushey Green in Catford with Frankie Fraser and Jimmy Moody. Insults went across the gaming tables, then the shooting started. Eddie Richardson was shot in the thigh, Fraser's thighbone was shattered, and Dickie Hart, a friend of the Kray twins, was shot in the chest and killed. Most of the men in the room ran. Moody picked Eddie Richardson up off the floor, carried him out and drove him away in his Jaguar.
Fraser was acquitted of Hart's murder and convicted of affray. Moody was charged with affray too, and found not guilty. Two nights later Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell, a Richardson man, in the Blind Beggar, and the police came for both firms. At the "torture trial" that followed, Charlie Richardson got 25 years. Moody, the firm's enforcer, was not convicted of anything, even after punching two serving detectives who were investigating the Richardsons.
Easter Sunday, 1968
Then he killed a man over an argument. At a party in West Dulwich, Moody and his older brother Richard exchanged words with William Day, a 21-year-old merchant navy steward. Day was found in a garden in Ildersley Grove with head injuries and died in hospital. Both brothers were convicted of manslaughter and got six years. It is the only killing Jimmy Moody was ever convicted of, and almost nobody tells it.
The Thursday Gang
When he came out in 1972 the Krays and the Richardsons were inside, and Moody became the muscle in an armed robbery gang that cut into security vans with a chainsaw. Scotland Yard noticed the raids nearly always fell on a Thursday, payroll day, and the Thursday Gang became the most successful armed robbers of the 1970s, with a haul of well over two million pounds. In 1978, dressed as a police officer, he stopped a security van inside the Blackwall Tunnel and took the keys off the drivers queuing behind it.
Over the wall at Brixton
In 1979 he was caught for three armed robberies worth £930,000 and remanded to D wing at Brixton. In the next cell was Gerard Tuite, from Mountnugent in County Cavan, a Provisional IRA bomber. With a third man, the armed robber Stan Thompson, and tools smuggled in inside a sock, they went through the walls of their cells. On the night of 16 December 1980 they crossed the exercise yard and climbed builders' scaffolding left against the perimeter. It was alleged that the IRA paid Moody £10,000 to bring Tuite with him. Tuite was caught in Drogheda fifteen months later. Moody never was.
The authorities say he went to Northern Ireland and worked with the Provisionals. By the late 1980s he was back in London, living in Hackney as "Mick the Irishman", wanted by the Metropolitan Police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the security services.
Victoria Park, June 1993
On 1 June 1993 Moody left his flat in Wadeson Street and walked to a pub on the edge of Victoria Park, where the landlord greeted him as Mick. By ten o'clock four people were left in the bar when a man with blond shoulder-length hair ordered a pint, never touched it, walked past Moody and shot him four times with a Webley .38, swearing at him as he fired. Moody was 52, with £90 and his house keys in his pocket.
Harry Wilkins, who had chased him for thirteen years, looked down at him in Poplar mortuary with eight weeks left before he retired. His family had known where he was all along. They met him in secret every week, and he doted on his daughter's little girl. Nobody has ever been charged with killing him. He was never caught. He was only found.