Jimmy Moody
James Alfred Moody was born on 27 February 1941 in Looe, a fishing town in Cornwall, where his mother had been sent to escape the bombing. Back in London he left school without a single exam pass. What he had instead was size and a reputation: six foot, eighteen stone, and a man other criminals called the hardest in London. Detectives called him extremely professional and extremely intimidating. The authorities called him a hired gun.
Scrap metal took him from the East End slum clearances across the river to Camberwell, and to the Richardson brothers, who ran protection, car park fraud and stolen goods and needed men who could settle an argument. He became their enforcer, a friend to the Krays and Frankie Fraser's closest ally.
On 7 March 1966 he was drinking with the Richardson firm at Mr Smith's and the Witchdoctor on Rushey Green in Catford when insults went across the gaming tables and the shooting started. Dickie Hart, a friend of the Kray twins, was shot dead, and Fraser's thighbone was shattered. Most of the men in the room ran. Moody picked his wounded boss up off the floor, carried him out and drove him away in his Jaguar. He was charged with affray 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 was convicted of nothing, even after punching two detectives who were investigating the firm.
The killing that did put him away came on Easter Sunday 1968. At a party in West Dulwich, Moody and his older brother Richard had 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.
He came out in 1972 to a London with the Krays and the Richardsons inside, and 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. 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, Moody stopped a security van inside the Blackwall Tunnel and took the keys off the drivers queuing behind it.
In 1979 he was caught for three armed robberies worth £930,000 and remanded to D wing at Brixton. In the next cell was a Provisional IRA bomber. With a third man and tools smuggled in inside a sock, they went through the walls of their cells, and 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 take the bomber with him. The bomber 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. His family knew where he was all along. They met him in secret every week, and he doted on his daughter's little girl.
On 1 June 1993 he walked from his flat in Wadeson Street to a pub on the edge of Victoria Park, where the landlord knew him as Mick. By ten o'clock four people were left in the bar. 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. He was 52, with £90 and his house keys in his pocket. Harry Wilkins, the detective who had chased him for thirteen years, looked down at him in Poplar mortuary with eight weeks left before he retired. Nobody has ever been charged with the killing. Moody was never caught. He was only found.
This is the film about him.