But I manage to get to do the housework. Frankie Fraser β obituary Frankie Fraser was a south London gangster who knew no language but violence and spent half his life behind bars. At least two home secretaries considered Fraser the most dangerous man in Britain, an image which, in old age, he only half-heartedly sought to dispel.
Although he was never convicted of murder, police reportedly held him responsible for 40 killings, but the bluster and bravado of a media-savvy gangland relic almost certainly inflated this tally, the actual scale of which remains unfathomable. Physically slight at only 5ft 4in, and invariably wearing a smile and β in retirement β a sharp Savile Row suit, Frankie Fraser was nevertheless a ferocious and brutal hatchet man.
Tony Lambrianou, a one-time henchman of the rival Kray brothers, was also a fan. What Fraser invariably threatened was violence. Indeed, his criminality was closely bound up with what one criminologist described as an overt β almost Samurai β vindication of violent action in pursuit of inverted honour.
He shot, slashed, stabbed and axed. An unregenerate villain of the deepest dye, Fraser satisfied the public appetite for vicarious thrill-seeking with a series of self-exculpatory memoirs in the s that launched him on a twilight career as a celebrity criminal. But his greatest moment of national notoriety came a quarter of a century earlier, during what the media billed as the Torture Trial in fact a series of trials in that became one of the longest in British criminal history.
The two Richardson brothers were convicted, and the elder, Charles, sentenced to 25 years. Fraser, tried separately, was jailed for Then they were turned over to Fraser. When Mason demurred, Fraser buried a hatchet in his skull, pinning his hand to his head. Mason was found, barely alive, wearing only his underpants and wrapped in a blanket, on the steps of the London Hospital in Whitechapel.
