The death of notorious South London villain Eddie Richardson is the end of a celebrity gangster era. It also reminds Searchlight of a long history of gangland connections to British fascism and the South African apartheid regime.

Richardson died on 29 January this year aged 90, but his death wasn’t announced until 14 August.

Newspaper obituaries concentrated on the mid-1960s when he and his even more notorious brother Charlie, the “Richardson brothers” terrorised South London, handing out brutal beatings and torture to anyone who crossed them.

Torture

Eventually justice caught up with the brothers, and in 1967 Old Bailey juries heard how the basement of their nightclub became a torture chamber where their victims’ toes were amputated and teeth pulled out with pliers.

Charlie got 25 years, and served 17. Eddie got 15 and served 11.

After his release in 1976, Eddie Richardson entered the porn trade as well as resuming his interests in illegal gambling and scrap metal.

Those who got in his way or owed him money could again expect to be terrorised, and it was in this connection that one of Britain’s most infamous nazis was drawn into Eddie Richardson’s gangsterism.

Surprisingly it was Steve Brady, an Imperial College graduate who was (and still is) one of the few genuine intellectuals on the British fascist scene, who ended up jailed for helping the Richardson gang pursue someone who owed them money over a porn deal.

Tear gas grenade

There seems to have been no political aspect to the crime, other than Brady getting drawn into the gangland scene through fellow members of the National Front and National Party.

In 1978 Brady was given a short jail sentence for assault, after an incident where a tear gas grenade was thrown into the home of one of Eddie Richardson’s enemies.

After failing to declare this conviction, Brady was later sacked from a London teaching job.

But neither his jail sentence nor his lifelong commitment to fascist and Ulster Loyalist politics (including Europe-wide connections to violent nazis) prevented him from obtaining and keeping a later job with the car firm Mercedes-Benz.

Though they had no political ideology, the Richardson gang earlier carried out burglaries and other crimes for BOSS, the South African apartheid regime’s spy agency.

South African spies

A secret report to Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in March 1977 by Sir Joe Hooper, the Whitehall Intelligence Coordinator, noted that Charlie Richardson made a statement from his prison cell admitting to carrying out such burglaries in London in 1965 on behalf of the South Africans.

Some details of the Richardson-BOSS connection remain secret.

There seems to have been a business as well as espionage connection to Gordon Winter, the most controversial South African agent ever to operate in Britain.

Winter’s ex-wife Jean Lagrange had a long-running affair with Charlie Richardson.

Organising burglaries

Even after the brothers had been imprisoned, she shared a house with Eddie’s wife Maureen, while organising burglaries and other crimes in London for BOSS, targeting the anti-apartheid movement.

During the mid-1960s, just before their criminal empire collapsed, the Richardsons invested in South African mining companies and worked with corrupt government officials in Johannesburg and Pretoria.

When one of these corrupt associates, Thomas Waldeck, was murdered, it helped trigger a chain of investigations ending in long jail sentences for the brothers, even though they were never convicted for any apartheid-related crimes.

One of the reasons for keeping some South African crimes secret even today is that BOSS’s main London operative John Fairer-Smith had a web of connections in high society, including British business interests and right-wing Tories.

Safehousing conspiracies

Steve Brady’s nazi networks often included people whose criminal connections went beyond political violence.

His close ally in terrorist safehousing conspiracies, Brighton printer Tony Hancock, had profitable sidelines in forging currency and fake passports.

Hancock and Brady’s fellow fascist militant Jimmy Doyle was a dodgy antique dealer and property developer with a conviction for handling stolen goods, and many connections in organised crime.

These gangland ties seem to have assisted intelligence services in the murders of Geoff Dominy (a Rhodesian agent who worked with Tony Hancock’s father and fellow fascist Alan Hancock and was a co-defendant in the first ever Race Relations Act prosecution), and Keith Wallace (a South African agent and Daily Mail motoring correspondent).

Suspicious deaths

The sudden deaths of Dominy in 1968 and Wallace in 1970 were officially ruled to be related to accidents (in Dominy’s case a rare condition supposedly brought on by an earlier car accident).

But Searchlight editor Gerry Gable and a Telegraph journalist and friend of Searchlight, Peter Gladstone-Smith, built up a dossier of evidence suggesting the deaths were suspicious.

One theory was that a South African agent was killed by the British authorities in retaliation for committing a murder on British soil.

Nazi-criminal links

Often the links between criminals and nazis are just part of their common interest in violence, corruption, and sexual perversion.

An example of this was Robert Bennett, the Oldham gangster jailed in 1976 for the gang rape of two 17-year-old girls, who later became one of the most senior activists in Oldham BNP soon after the 2001 riots.

In recent decades the fascist scene in Britain as well as Europe has regularly attracted drug dealers, because behind their traditionalist pose, far-right activists are often drug addicts.

Illegal drugs

The Combat 18 and Blood & Honour organisations were especially well-known for the prevalence of cocaine and other illegal drugs.

More recently two young leaders of the racist faction in Ulster Loyalism, Mark Brown and Dan Douglas (who calls himself Dan Grundle and is the nephew of NF activist Jimmy Grundle), are well known for their drug connections and violence against women.

Eddie Richardson’s death, though, reminds us that sometimes the nazi-gangster relationship was at a more serious and deadly level.