How Noel ‘Razor’ Smith left crime behind (2024)

Give me liberty, or give me death. Give me liberty, or give me death.

The recent events featuring the ill-fated Raoul Moat serve to remind me of how lucky I am to be alive. My own confrontations with armed police officers were just as dramatic, though never fatal. But that was only luck. The police always seemed to pounce when I was unarmed, and for that I’m now grateful, because back then I hardly ever stepped outside the door without at least one gun on me. In those days I was a hardened career criminal — a bank robber and GBH merchant — a real nasty piece of work. So, as the news coverage about Moat unfolded, I knew what the eventual outcome would be. I smiled cynically when the copper on the TV appealed to Moat to give himself up and think of his future. Moat had already been in prison and knew exactly what sort of future he had to look forward to. The bleak and barren landscape of British prison life, surrounded by the junkies and the mentally ill, under the jackboot of the Home Office for the rest of his days, being bludgeoned with petty rules and regulations, it was no surprise to me that he took his own life rather than rot in jail. Maybe, just maybe, had I known how many years I was going to serve in prison when I had my first taste of incarceration in 1975 I might have opted for the quick bang and gone, rather than the slow death of imprisonment. Despite what you may have heard, prison is no walk in the park. Believe me, I know.

Since the age of 14 I have spent time in 37 different prisons and juvenile jails. I’m 49 years old and have wasted almost 34 years behind bars.

My first conviction for armed robbery came in 1977, when I was 16 years old, and that was also my first appearance at the Old Bailey. In my early twenties I became a professional bank robber. My second conviction for armed robbery and possession of firearms with intent was in 1987, and I was jailed for 14 years. Inside prison I did my time the hard way, forever kicking against a system that I loathed. I was involved in riots, fights, assaulting prison officers, the manufacture of weapons, and escapes. In 1990, at HMP Wandsworth, I was part of a team of Category A prisoners who assaulted seven prison officers and tried to hijack a JCB in order to crash through the walls of the prison. Our attempted escape failed and I, along with the rest of the team, was beaten like a red-headed stepchild. I kept on assaulting prison officers, and one night in the punishment block at Wandsworth prison three screws entered my cell with a noose fashioned from a prison-issue bed-sheet and told me that if I persisted in my violence towards them then I would end up as “just another prison suicide statistic”. They were not joking.

Two years later I escaped from prison and went on a rampage of bank robbery and violence for 79 days. When I was arrested, after a police ambush in rush-hour traffic during which the police fired two shots at me — I was unarmed — I was convicted of 11 bank robberies and given a further 15 years. I spent time on what prisoners call the “ghost train” — being transferred between prisons at short notice in order to keep me disorientated and too confused to cause trouble. I called in at HMP High Down, Wormwood Scrubs, Dartmoor, Parkhurst, Albany, Winson Green, Bristol and Exeter, among others, for the next five years. In 1997 I was released from Albany prison, on the Isle of Wight. I came out as a bitter and twisted 37-year-old, but tried to go straight for a while. For three months I was employed as a road sweeper for a take-home pay of £90 a week, and lived in a grotty bedsit. But I got tired of living on soup and toasted carpet, and decided that the straight life was not for me. I guessed that at my age I had one more shot at the prize. So I made a phone call.

Throughout the winter of 1997-98 I was the gunman for one of the best teams of bank robbers in London. We hit a couple of banks a month and lived the good life on the proceeds. On one job, on Christmas Eve, we wore Santa hats on top of our ski-masks and wished the bank staff a merry Christmas as we made off with the loot. The Flying Squad nicknamed us “The Laughing Bank Robbers” and decided to make us top of their Most Wanted list. In August 1998 I was arrested after a police ambush by 27 police officers from three different squads, most armed with Glock 18 semiautomatic pistols and Heckler & Koch submachine guns. One false move, one twitchy trigger finger, and I doubt that I would be here today. I appeared for trial at the Old Bailey for the final time and I was jailed for life under the two-strikes-and-out law.

I spent two years in HMP Belmarsh and was then shipped to HMP Whitemoor, one of the most secure top-security prisons in this country, where I spent a further three years. It was while I was at Whitemoor that I received the most devastating news of my life. My youngest son, Joseph, was found dead in suspicious circ*mstances. He was 19. I had never given a thought about my family, my children, or anyone who cared about me. Never thought about what effect my lifestyle was having on them. For years, decades, I had been in prison, on the run or getting up to all kinds of skulduggery, while outside my children were growing up without a father. I applied to attend my son’s funeral but was refused on the grounds that I was “much too dangerous” even if I was double-handcuffed and escorted by six prison officers. The security governor told me that he couldn’t put his staff at risk. I had spent my life building a reputation as a staunch criminal, I had fought the system at every turn, and now, when I was at my lowest and needed something from them, they had as good as spat in my face. It was my own fault; I had created a monster.

After Joe’s death I had to sit down and re-evaluate my life and where it was going. For the first time I began to regret the things that I’d done. I had not been there for my son — instead I had been playing at being a tough guy, surrounded by gangsters, terrorists and murderers. To my peers I was a “diamond geezer”, “one of the chaps”, but to my children I was a stranger who had never been there for them when they needed me. I decided that I wasn’t going to let Joe’s death be for nothing. I was determined to change my life. Maybe it would be too little too late, but something had to change.

I volunteered for HMP Grendon, a prison unique in the system for rehabilitating long-term violent recidivists. Grendon used cognitive group therapy and psychodrama to instil a sense of empathy in its volunteers. It was no easy ride and many times, when the reality of some of the things I had done in my past struck me like hammer blows, I felt like giving up. But then I would think of my son, dying alone, and my family who had stuck by me and supported me through all the terrible times, and I knew there was no going back. For five years I attended daily group therapy sessions. I laid my soul bare, and listened as others did the same, and I learnt to finally grow up and accept that I had wasted my life. Grendon was the saving of me and helped me to realise that I no longer wanted to create any more victims of my actions. I left Grendon determined to go straight and to make something of my life. But I was still a lifer, and had to spend a further two years in jail before the Parole Board deemed me safe enough to be released back into society.

Despite the fancy mission statement about turning out “good and useful members of society”, the prison system of this country is not interested in rehabilitation. It is in the business of warehousing humans, and little else. In more than three decades of prison all I was ever offered by way of rehabilitation was a selection of tick-box offending behaviour courses that could be manipulated by a chimp. For some reason the Home Office sets great store in these courses. They prove nothing, and they don’t even come close to making anyone change their ways. There are some prisons that do offer genuine rehabilitation, but they are few and far between. If you do want to change your life while in prison, it’s a struggle of epic proportions.

It’s a sad indictment of the prison system in particular, and society as a whole, that every day there are people leaving prison in a worse state than when they went in. Seventy per cent of prisoners do not even have a basic education. Two thirds are suffering from an identifiable mental illness. And more people use heroin for the first time in prison than take it on the outside. More men, women and children die in our prisons every year than were killed during the entire terror of the infamous Spanish Inquisition. There are no “holiday-camp-style prisons”, despite what some tabloids would have you believe. Prison doesn’t help bad people to turn good, it makes good people bad and bad people worse, and nobody seems to give a toss. And, if you ask me, I’d say that’s why Raoul Moat pulled the trigger in the end. Because he’d already experienced a bit of it.

As for me? In 2004, with the encouragement of my friend Will Self, I wrote the first part of my autobiography, A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun, of which the prison authorities were definitely not enamoured — mainly because I revealed so much of the system’s dirty laundry in public. My fellow prisoners loved the book, and it encouraged others to begin writing in prison. The book also became required reading for first-year criminology students at Birmingham City University. A few of the screws, the decent ones, congratulated me and were supportive, but prison managers, “the suits”, didn’t want the spotlight of publicity pointing at their institutions, especially if that spotlight was being directed by a “toe-rag” like me. You might think that an organisation that had spent all those years supposedly trying to make me give up crime and take up another occupation would be delighted that I was finally making a go of something legal. But in reality the prison system didn’t want career criminals such as me getting off the crime and imprisonment merry-go-round. If more criminals were actually to be rehabilitated then some prison staff would find themselves without a job. And what else would they be able to do? After all, you can only have so many traffic wardens.

In the ensuing publicity from the book, I was investigated by the Prison Service/ Home Office and warned not to speak to the media or have anything else published as long as I was in prison, or I would be back on the ghost train and heading north. So I began writing the second part of my autobiography, A Rusty Gun, though it couldn’t be published until I came out.

The book covers the five years I spent at HMP Grendon in therapy, and is the only first-hand account of this world-famous prison written by someone who has been on the sharp end. It’s a book that the prison system would rather you didn’t read. People might start to wonder why there are not more prisons like Grendon, which has the lowest reconviction rates for serious violent recidivists in this country. They might demand that their tax money be spent on more of the same, instead of on warehousing prisoners in overcrowded Victorian jails in which the system is no longer even bothered to pay lip service to the concept of rehabilitation, and where all criminals learn is how to smoke heroin and plan bigger crimes for when they are released.

After serving 12 years of my life sentence (my minimum tariff was eight years), I was released, clutching my manuscript and facing a new life. It was like starting afresh, because in my previous career as a criminal I hadn’t really existed officially. I had never paid taxes, never had a driving licence, passport, or National Insurance number, and never carried ID. If it wasn’t for my long criminal record, and the fact that they were holding my physical body, the authorities would have been hard pressed to prove I existed. Normally, on leaving prison, I would already have been plotting my first job, but this time it was different — there were no criminal associates meeting me at the gates in a big flash motor, no coming-home party, no cash pressed into my hand as a coming-home present. I had renounced my past life and everything connected with it, and in the criminal world I was now persona non grata — a rusty gun, as we say in the underworld. And that’s the way I like it.

I’ve been out now since May of this year and for the first time I’m peaceful and content with my life. I no longer rob banks, or sleep with a gun under my pillow, or slash the faces of my rivals. I’m one of the few career criminals of my generation who has found genuine rehabilitation. But that was because I wanted it and worked hard for it. As my old pal and ex-Public Enemy No 1 John McVicar once wrote, “Being a criminal was a great life; the only problem was that they put me in prison for it”.

A Rusty Gun: Facing up to a Life of Crime, by Noel “Razor” Smith, is published by Viking at £12.99. To order it for £11.69 including p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop