‘I am not a monster’: The Kray twins’ hitman on how he survived a life of crime
The IndependentFor free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “We gave the guards tea, and no one went to hospital, and I am proud of that,” says Foreman, a stocky man whose grandfatherly demeanour is hard to square with his former incarnation as a freelance enforcer for the Krays, the notorious identical twin gangsters who stalked London in the 1950s and 1960s. Foreman’s home is cramped, but he doesn’t need much room after more than a decade of living in a prison cell, “my every movement watched by screws”, he says. Paul Van Carter, director of Fred, a chilling 2018 documentary about Foreman’s life, calls him the last living legend among the “old school London heavy gangsters” who came of age on the streets of the British capital after the Second World War. “If I had, my life could’ve turned out differently.” Foreman’s criminal career began in the 1940s at age 16 when he lived in Battersea, in south London, then a tough neighbourhood.
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