As a film about his life and crimes is released, the longtime associate of the Kray twins talks about today’s knife gangs, mentoring Tom Hardy, and how there’s nothing glamorous about his violent past

Old villains don’t die these days, they end up as books or films. Half a century after Jack “The Hat” McVitie was murdered by Reggie Kray, the man who had the job of disposing of his body is the subject of Fred: the Godfather of British Crime, a new documentary. The film comes just a couple of years after the publication of The Last Real Gangster, the eighth book to which Fred Foreman has attached his name.

We meet in a cafe overlooking the canal in Little Venice, west London, far from the Battersea of his war-time boyhood, the East End of his long association with the Krays and his involvement in at least three murders, and just around the corner from the sheltered accommodation where he now lives. Death comes in less dramatic forms these days.

“It’s God’s waiting list,” he says of his current home. “Two died there last week. That’s all I’m looking forward to – when is it my turn?” He says this with a chuckle as he tucks into his veal, spaghetti and red wine. He has even chosen the music for his funeral, he says, a 1930s song called Live and Let Live.

Some might question whether that was quite the theme tune of his life of professional crime. And it would be fair to say that no one has acquired quite as many nicknames as Foreman. Apart from the tagline of the film – “I’m not the Godfather, not Marlon Brando!” he protests – there is the Undertaker, the High Executioner, Brown Bread Fred, the Guv’nor, the Mean Machine and the tortuous Managing Director of British Crime, which was forced on him by his first publisher.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Foreman (centre) with, to his left, Ronnie Kray and Christine Keeler, circa 1963. Photograph: Hulton Getty

Now 86, Foreman was acquitted of two 1960s murders, those of Tommy “Ginger” Marks and Frank “the Mad Axeman” Mitchell, both of which he later admitted in his autobiography, Respect, when it was published in 1997. In those days, the double jeopardy rule meant that you could not be tried twice for the same crime, but the law changed with the 2003 Criminal Justice Act so that “new and compelling” evidence can lead to a retrial.

Marks had been involved in an attack on Foreman’s philandering brother, George, who was shot in the groin for having an affair with a local villain’s wife. Foreman is a little coy on the subject when pressed on film about all this by its director, Paul Van Carter. “I’m not happy about this, Paul,” he says at one stage as he revisits the scene in Bethnal Green where Marks was shot dead in 1965 and is asked to describe what happened. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

He is equally tightlipped about Mitchell, whom the Krays had helped escape from Dartmoor prison and hidden in London, but who had become a loose cannon; according to Foreman today, Mitchell had been armed and vowed to take six policemen with him rather than return to jail. The Krays he now describes as “bad news” – and the film makes it clear what a grim and brutal crew they were.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Foreman leaving Bow Street magistrates’ court after being charged with involvement in the 1983 £6m Security Express robbery. Photograph: Martin Keene/PA

He is also reticent about his undertaking skills in disposing of McVitie, for which he was jailed for 10 years in 1969. “There was a facility to go out to sea,” he says in the film. “Let’s just leave it at that.” That facility was for a body to be wrapped in chicken wire, attached to weights and dumped in “muddy waters”.

Gang warfare in its current form has claimed many lives already this year, with dozens of fatal stabbings in London, many of them gang-related and involving much younger men than in the 1960s mayhem. How do the two worlds compare? “I think it’s terrible what’s going on,” he says. “ I have no respect for anyone just stabbing someone with a 12-inch blade – a child can stab another person. You don’t prove you’re a hard man by stabbing someone. Years ago, when you had an argument, it was a matter of a straightener – a street fight, bare-knuckle. This showed how tough you were.”

Would any of today’s young post-code gang members, who also seek that word “respect” by stabbing each other, be writing their memoirs or appearing on film in half a century? “I don’t think anyone who has turned to crime these days is going to live long enough to build up a reputation, are they? It’s impossible to get away with it now, with all the CCTV and everything.”

Born in 1932, the son of a respectable taxi driver and the youngest of five brothers, the elder of whom served in the second world war, Foreman was initially evacuated but returned during the blitz and witnessed some of its effects, which, he says, still give him nightmares. His own teenage years involved different forms of violence to the knife-wielders and moped robbers of today.

“I was at the Old Bailey at 16 years of age for affray. One of the weapons produced in evidence was a sand-weighted sock.” He laughs at the memory. “But I don’t want to glamourise what I did because it’s not fucking glamorous, is it? I’ve done 16 years inside, so when you weigh up the pros and cons of it I don’t see it balancing out in my favour. All the money I got out of crime, it doesn’t pay off in the long term. The lessons speak for themselves: missing all your birthdays and Christmases and new years, missing out on your children growing up.” He says he sees little of his own family now.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Foreman relaxing in Marbella, the ‘Costa del Crime’. Photograph: Lionsgate

So what about those old crimes he has written about in the past? “I don’t want to glorify anything,” he says of the murders. “They’ve got relatives and I don’t want to keep rubbing it in. I knew Jack the Hat’s boys when I was living in Spain and we were quite pals together; they used to have a drink with me in Eagles, the country club I had there.”

But in the film he describes in some detail shooting, not fatally, two men who had assaulted a young woman in one of his clubs. (He had an extensive property portfolio before the law caught up with him, which included clubs, pubs, flats, a casino, a recording studio and a boxing gym.) “Blew his ear off,” he says of one of the miscreants. “That was the end of that little scenario.”

The foreword to The Last Real Gangster, published in 2015, was written by the actor Tom Hardy, who consulted Foreman as he prepared to play both Kray twins in Legend, the Brian Helgeland film that broke box office records that year. What did he think of the film? “Not much – but Tom Hardy was amazing. There’s only been one film (of that genre) I really liked and that was The Long Good Friday. Everyone says it was based on me – there were so many similarities.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reggie and Ronnie Kray ... Foreman now describes the gangland twins as ‘bad news’. Photograph: William Lovelace/Getty Images

His other long jail sentence, of nine years, was for involvement in the £6m Security Express robbery in Shoreditch, east London, in 1983. Foreman was arrested years later for handling the proceeds of the robbery after he had moved to the Costa del Crime in Spain, bought property and opened his club. Much to his indignation, as there was then no extradition treaty between Spain and the UK, he was hoisted back to England still in his shorts and flip-flops. The robbery’s ringleader was Terry Perkins who died, aged 69, earlier this year in Belmarsh jail, having been convicted of the 2015 £14m Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary. Would he have gone with Perkins on that “one last job” if he had been asked? “I’m retired! Can’t do it any more.”

How did the film, which has the song “Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to?” over its end titles, come about? Was it his idea? “Nothing was my idea – I was manipulated right, left and centre,” he says cheerfully, adding that he is happy with the end result and then, diplomatically: “I just hope it encourages kids to get a good education.”

Fred: the Godfather of British Crime (Lionsgate UK) is available on DVD and digital.