OT THE MOB
ears to llains... self in thing. A bus trying to get through couldn’t. Sure enough, the bus driver starts banging his horn and shouting for us to move. “Roy was getting annoyed and snapped. One stare from Roy was enough. The guy just waited until we were finished. It all ended well and everyone lived to tell the tale.” When he jumped into the back of a car at a meeting with Eddie Richardson – arch-rival of The Krays in the 1960s before they were locked up – he was blanked by the elderly gangland boss DAVE COURTNEY: He earned his hardman reputation as a knuckle duster-wielding debt collector. Says he has been shot, stabbed and had his nose almost bitten off.
The character of Big Chris played by Vinnie Jones in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was said to be based on Dave Courtney.
This bleak portrait was taken in Plumstead, South East London, in 2011 at the wake for his stepson Genson – shot dead in a ganglandstyle assassination.
The 23-year-old was gunned down in his VW Golf outside his girlfriend’s house in nearby Greenwich.
Friends and underworld faces attended the service, before a wake where Courtney and Co drowned their sorrows and smoked as they honoured his stepson’s memory. and feared the worst. I was getting no reply and I thought ‘My God. Maybe I am getting taken away to get done in.’
“My mind was wandering at this point,” he revealed, “Then out of the blue someone in the car said you will need to speak up he is stone deaf in the left ear. I sighed thinking danger over.”
Other images include modern day hardman Dave Courtney at the wake for his murdered son Genson, the last portrait of Charlie Richardson – notorious for torturing his gangland rival and ageing villain Ginger Dennis ...sizing up one last jeweller’s window. MICKY FAWCETT: Minder for Reggie Kray’s wife Frances and part of the twins’ Firm in the 1960s. After they murdered George Cornell he decided they had gone too far and planned to shoot them but lost his nerve. Now aged 87. GINGER DENNIS: One of London’s most feared villains from the 40s to the 90s, William Dennis was a car dealer and Kray enforcer. Brian photographed him outside a jewellers’ shop.