I quickly tell him everything I’ve heard about it from other gangsters, journalists and police contacts, and he listens intently. I also take the opportunity to reiterate the reason for my visit, talk about the book I plan to write and also manage to mention the name of the well-respected criminal who provided me with Tippett’s address. When I’ve finished, Tippett seems much calmer and the earlier hostility has almost gone.
‘So, what’s happening with the Francis case?’ I ask again.
‘The police have pulled in a seventy-two-year-old for questioning.’
‘Anyone you know?’
‘It’s my dad.’
For a moment I am struck dumb with shock. Then a question falls out of my mouth before I have a chance to stop it: ‘Do you think he did it?’
There is a long pause, then Tippett shrugs his shoulders and moves to one side. ‘Perhaps you’d better come in after all.’
Jimmy Tippett Jnr was introduced to the gangster life at an early age. His father, a hugely successful boxer in the early fifties and once the leading contender for the British Lightweight crown, had been an honorary member of London’s underworld almost from the moment he stepped into the ring.
With a reputation as a fearsome puncher – twenty-three of his twenty-four professional wins were by knockout – Tippett Snr earned the respect and friendship of the top villains of the day who then, as now, were big fans of the fight game. The links became even stronger when his sister, Julie, married notorious armed robber Freddie Sewell, who sparked a massive police hunt when he shot dead a police officer in Blackpool after a botched raid on a jeweller’s.
After an unexpectedly early retirement from the fight game – he lost his licence after a brawl with six police officers – Tippett Snr used the power of his name to gain work as a celebrity minder and movie stuntman, associating with the top villains of his day along the way.
In the mid-1960s he opened a club, the El Partido in south London, which was closed down by Drugs Squad officers after a High Court judge labelled it: ‘the biggest narcotics distribution centre in England’.
Since then, Tippett Snr’s name has cropped up in connection with everything from the Brighton bombing to a multi-million pound diamond robbery, as well as a number of contract killings. But because none of the allegations against him have ever been proved in a court of law, Tippett’s name has failed to appear in any of the many books that chronicle what is now regarded as the golden era of organised crime.
As we sit in his kitchen drinking coffee, Jimmy Tippett Jnr’s respect and admiration for his father is unmistakable, and he feels it is high time more people were aware of his unsung status among the criminal elite, particularly as his father is often reluctant to talk about it.
‘The problem,’ Tippett tells me softly, ‘is that the only people who anyone ever gets to hear about are the ones that get caught. If you’re doing the business and you make a good living but then you retire without going inside, your name just fades away. In years to come people assume you were a nobody. But that’s not always the case. They say crime doesn’t pay but I’m telling you that’s bollocks. If you do it right, it pays beautiful.
‘When I was growing up, I had a fantastic life, thanks to my dad. Me and my sister never wanted for anything. We went on the most beautiful holidays you can imagine all over the world. One year it was off to Egypt to visit the Pyramids, the next it was flying over a safari park in Kenya in a helicopter and after that it was watching the sun rise over the Sahara desert. None of it would have been possible without my dad doing what he did.’
With the likes of ‘Flash’ Harry Hayward and Charlie Kray being regular visitors to the family home and Freddie Sewell for an uncle it was, perhaps, inevitable that Tippett Jnr would ultimately be drawn into a life of crime himself, though it happened far sooner than anyone expected.
When his son was around twelve Tippett Snr took over the running of a small spieler in Lewisham, south London. It wasn’t exactly a high-class venture – just three rooms above a kebab shop – but his reputation was enough to ensure that all the local faces made it their regular haunt, coming together several nights each week to play poker, kaluki and bet on horses.
‘I was only twelve or thirteen and used to make the teas on a Saturday. The place was electric; it was really buzzy, full of characters, and pretty soon I got to know them all. The place was like a magnet for all the gangs, and young thieves off the manor would come in and out all day with racks of clothes, trays of diamond rings, you name it, all for a fraction of the real price.
‘I remember being so excited every time I walked up the stairs to the place. Just the smell of the cigar smoke – everyone in there seemed to have one between their teeth all day long – would set my heart racing.
‘The amount of money going round the place was incredible, especially in the days after some of the lads had a good result. I remember one robber who was losing badly at poker and was down to his last two grand, which was sitting in front of him, all in fifties. Rather than see it go to the bloke he was playing he just picked it up off the table and slung it into the gas fire. A couple of the younger guys ran to try and get it out but the bloke pulled out a .45 and shouted out: “Any cunt goes near that lot and I’ll put a fucking bullet in his head.”
‘Every now and then you’d hear about someone from the club getting killed or stabbed or badly injured but none of it ever put me off. I was hooked on the life and I absolutely loved it. I began going sick at school just so I could get up to the spieler and be round everyone. At first my mum tried to get me out of it but after a while she just gave up. I think she knew in her heart I was going to go into the life. After all, I was born into it.’
The young Tippett joined the ranks of Britain’s armed robbers just at the end of a thirty-year stretch when it had been the crime of choice of the criminal elite. Armed robbery had taken over from the previous favourite – safe-blowing – which had grown to epidemic proportions in the aftermath of the Second World War as disgruntled servicemen turned their skills with explosives into a way of making ends meet. Rapid improvements in safe design meant that by the late 1950s the job took too long and too much explosive was needed to make it viable.
Back then Britain was a wholly cash society and every factory or office would take in huge deliveries of it every Thursday to pay the staff their weekly wage. Despite the vast sums involved, armoured vans were a rarity and most of the deliveries were made by couriers, carrying the cash in simple briefcases.
In those early days robbing the couriers was all too easy and small gangs could come away with big money, using nothing more sophisticated that a couple of coshes. By the end of the decade twenty couriers were being injured in raids each week and something had to be done.
The introduction of armoured vehicles pushed the gangs in the direction of banks, the design of which had not changed for years. There was no CCTV, no security screening and wooden boxes full of notes sat on open view on the counter. (Many banks considered it essential to display large sums to impress customers.) But carrying out raids in enclosed spaces with large groups of people meant that coshes were no longer an option. Sawn-off shotguns became the weapon of choice.
The 1960s saw the first of the so-called ‘project’ crimes in which larger, more sophisticated gangs operating under a rigid leadership would tackle high-value jobs that required intricate planning. In 1962 one such gang raided the BOAC building at Heathrow airport. Wearing fake moustaches, bowler hats and pin-striped suits in order to blend in with the crowds, they carried special umbrellas in which the central spine had been replaced by a heavy iron bar.
The heist, organised by a certain Bruce Reynolds, had been expected to net half a million pounds but in the event the gang only got £62,000. (Although they managed to get clean away, Reynolds went on to organise the Great Train Robbery the following year; it proved to be his downfall – he and the rest of the gang responsible were eventually caught.)
By the 1970s improvements in bank security had forced the gangs back out on to the streets, where they began to target the cash-in-transit vans. One team found success by using chainsaws to cut through the side armour and pull out the bags of cash inside, while smaller outfits would often make do with ‘working the pavement’ – snatching one or two bags as the guard transferred them from van to bank. The most skilled practitioners would refer to themselves as ‘pavement artists’.
In Britain, and London in particular, gangland was thriving and many gangs were enjoying a high level of success with armed robbery, but compared to the rest of the world the UK’s gangs were still operating in the Dark Ages. In Europe and America organised crime was evolving into something far more serious and sinister, thanks to the increasing availability of drugs and the vast profits to be made, but in Britain crime was all about cash.
All of that changed with a single job: Brinks Mat.
It was just after 6.40 a.m. on 26 November 1983 that six armed men burst into the Heathrow depot of the security company Brinks Mat. The robbers disabled the sophisticated security system, tied up the guards, doused them with petrol and threatened to set them alight unless they revealed the combinations to the final locks.
In the following days, police and security experts remarked on how well organised and professional the raid had been. The truth was different. That bit of work had been punted around south London only for a few weeks. Mickey McAvoy, a young hardman, and an old blagger called Brian Robinson had put the word out that they were looking for a couple of sensible lads to help them with an inside job. They had heard there would be £3 million in cash in the vault and the plan was to split it five ways. It was only when they got there that they found the gold. They hadn’t expected it. They were so disorganised that they didn’t even have a big enough vehicle to deal with it. They had to go and get a van. They were supposed to be in and out within minutes, but the job took nearly two hours.
Until the Brinks Mat job, London’s villains had simply spent the cash they stole or hidden it in secret stashes, but the need to convert gold into ingots changed the face of British organised crime – and law enforcement – for ever as the gangs suddenly acquired skills in smuggling, money-laundering and a host of related activities.
But the crime also dealt a shattering blow to the already shaky notion of honour among thieves.
Tracking down those at the heart of the raid presented few problems for detectives: the fact that the robbers knew their way around the security system pointed to an inside job. When detectives discovered that one of the guards, Anthony Black, had arrived late for work, missing the robbery, they pulled him in for questioning and he soon cracked. Robinson, who had been living with Black’s sister, and McAvoy were quickly arrested. What also helped was that, where a modern villain will be careful to avoid doing anything that might draw attention to them, the two main players had done little to disguise their new-found wealth. Within weeks of the robbery both men had left the council houses they were living in and had bought enormous homes in Kent for cash. McAvoy had two Rottweiler guard dogs called Brinks and Mat.
Mickey McAvoy was sentenced to twenty-five years and quickly tried to strike a deal to give back his share of the money in exchange for a cut in his sentence. But by then the money had vanished. McAvoy, along with other members of the gang, made the mistake of believing his friends would look after his share of the gold so it would be waiting for him when he got out. Those friends included, among others, George Francis and Brian Perry.
Since 2000 there have been at least five murders linked to the Brinks Mat case. Many are convinced that a number of scores are being settled, while the whereabouts of the money – only eleven of the 26,000 gold bars have so far been recovered – remains a mystery.
When Jimmy Tippett’s mobile phone rings once more a glance at my watch reveals that we’ve been talking for more than two hours. This time it’s good news – his father has been released without charge and plans a night out on the town to celebrate. Jimmy sits back in his chair and runs a palm over the shadowy stubble sprouting from his chin. ‘It’s a strange thing, being part of a London gang. It’s not like being in the Triads or the Cosa Nostra. There’s no initiation ceremony or anything like that, nothing formal, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t codes of conduct, accepted ways of doing things. And the most important rules are, no matter what happens, you don’t fuck people over and you don’t grass.
‘The people I was working with, they were my friends and their dads were friends of my dad. We had all grown up the same way so the whole gang was a hundred per cent trustworthy. You always knew that, whatever happened, no one was ever going to turn grass because their whole family would be against them.’
They targeted mostly Securicor vans, pavement work. Tippett Jnr was the youngest so he learnt from the rest of them. They had a combination of experience and inside information, which meant they knew which vans to go after and when to get the team together.
‘On the day of a job the tension was just incredible, almost too much. I was actually physically sick a few times. When you’re waiting for it to start, it’s nerve-racking stuff. A second is like a minute and every minute is like an hour. You become totally paranoid, convinced that everyone and his wife is looking at you. Then the signal comes and, bang, it’s off. We’d always work it the same way – two of us would approach the guard from behind and one of them would hold a gun to the back of his thigh. That way he knows that if he tries anything and you let one off, his main artery is fucked and he’s going to bleed to death.
‘Most of the time the guards would do whatever you said but a few times they resisted and you let a few shots off into the air. The bang and the flame would normally be enough to bring them into line, but every now and then we had to use a bit of violence.