A Scots photographer has told how he incurred the wrath of gangster Freddie Foreman – who inspired the Bob Hoskins character in gangster flick The Long Good Friday.
Violent killer Foreman, 92, was considered one of the UK’s most dangerous criminals and was an associate of the Krays.
But he was left fuming when Scots photographer Brian Anderson turned up late for a photo-shoot with the notorious hardman.
Brian, 55, who features Foreman in his new book on Britains’s most feared criminals, said: “The character Bob Hoskins played in the Long Good Friday was based on Freddie and the plot about Irish crime families coming into London symbolised the end of Freddie’s reign.
“Out of everybody I’ve photographed, Freddie Foreman was the one I wanted to pin down and document.
“I was in London and called him up and told him I was a photojournalist doing a book of infamous gangsters.
Freddie Foreman, Pic: Brian Anderson
“He told me to pick him up in a limousine, throw some money about and he would do it.
“I said, ‘I don’t have any money, I’m just a normal guy. I’ve a car full of petrol and that’s it’.
He said, ‘Okay’ and told me to go to Langan’s restaurant at eight.”
Anderson headed to the wrong restaurant and was late getting to Langan’s, owned at the time by Michael Caine.
“By the time I got to the right Langan’s in Mayfair, Freddie was sitting there with his associates eating his steak,” he said.
“Freddie was Gangster number one and here I am rolling in 45 minutes late.
“He looked up and said, ‘You’re fu**ing late, mate.’
“That was the first time I photographed him and we became quite good pals after that.”
The Glaswegian replicated key movie moments as they drove around London, including getting Foreman to stand in front of Tower Bridge as Hoskins did in the movie.
He said: “It felt like I was recreating The Long Good Friday.
Freddie Foreman and Brian Anderson. Pic: Brian Anderson
“People would shout over to him, ‘Alright Fred, killed anybody lately?’ and he’d say, ‘Well the night is still young’.
“I reminded him of the Bob Hoskins scene where he is standing on a boat at Tower Bridge.
“So that was where we went to recreate that image.
“He framed it and put it in his living room and said it was his favourite photograph.
“I said, ‘You’ve been photographed by David Bailey’, He said, ‘I know, it’s better than the Bailey ones’.
“I took Fred home. He was drunk.
“On the way, I was worried he’d fall and crack his nut.
“He was in the back seat and we drove past The Blind Beggar where Reggie Kray murdered Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie.
“They had dumped the body in a car outside Fred’s pub and he got rid of it.
“He asked if I was hungry and we stopped at a KFC and then went back to Fred’s.
“We ate at Fred’s place in Maida Vale and he was talking about old capers and guys he’d put a gun to.
“I slept on his couch that night.
London gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray refresh themselves with a cup of tea. They had just spent 36 hours being questioned by the police about the murder of George Cornell. (Photo by William Lovelace/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
“I cracked my toe off a gold bullion door-stopper in the middle of the night and yelled out.
“Fred up and asked, ‘Who’s that?’ I said, ‘It’s me Fred. I kicked your gold bullion door-stopper. Is it real?’
He said, ‘Yeah, don’t even think about nicking it.’”
For a large part of the 1960s, Foreman and The Krays gang The Firm ruled the streets of the East End of London.
A prominent figure in London’s gangland, Foreman literally knew where the bodies were buried.
Nicknamed ‘Brown Bread Fred’ — Cockney rhyming slang for ‘dead’ — he had a reputation for disposing of bodies.
In his 1997 autobiography Respect he admitted that he murdered Frank ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell and Tommy ‘Ginger’ Marks in the 1960s – revenge for his brother being shot in the groin.
He’d been acquitted of the murders at the Old Bailey but served 10 years for the disposal of McVitie’s corpse.
“He’s the most notorious gangster who is responsible for most of the deaths in the last 60 years,” Anderson said.
A hitman for the Krays, Foreman served a total of 16 years in prison including a stretch for his involvement in the 1983 Security Express robbery in Shoreditch, the largest cash robbery in the UK.
Freddie Foreman outside The Punchbowl London. Pic: Brian Anderson
Anderson said: “I remember the second time I met him we were having dinner at the Punchbowl in Mayfair.
“He went to the toilet.
“When he came out I told him I had paid for the meal and he said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that’, but I explained that I didn’t want to give Scots a bad name.
“He later sold the pub to Madonna and Guy Ritchie.”
He added: “In my opinion Foreman was the Gangster number one, the main one.”
As a street photographer Brian Anderson has taken danger in his stride to document Britain’s toughest gangsters.
But not everyone wants to be in front of the camera.
“One of the Hatton Garden mob told me not to phone them again,” Anderson said. “They were busy planning the robbery and couldn’t believe I was trying to put them in a book.
“Some gangsters act like old women and ask me to delete the photographs because they have two chins.
“I tell them I’m not a plastic surgeon.
“Or it’s, ‘Don’t put me next to him in the book because I don’t like him’.
“I’m like, ‘The book is called Faces, not Friends Reunited’.
“My wife will tell you about some of the calls I’ve had in the middle of the night.
“One gangster wanted to shoot me because I wouldn’t put him on the front cover.
“At that point, my wife wanted me to call the gangland thing a day because I was being threatened with machine guns.
“It’s crazy, when I look back on it.”
* Brian Anderson’s book of underworld gangster pix Faces 2 is available from www.glasgoweyes.com
Don’t miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond – Sign up to our daily newsletter here.