‘It’s not about glorifying crime’: ex-convicts in demand for talks and tours
Nearly 30 years after the “hitman” murder for which he was jailed for life, Kevin Lane will take to the stage of the Cambridge Country Club this month to share his thoughts on crime and punishment.
For anyone who saw him recently in the Channel 4 programme Banged Up, explaining to a gobsmacked Tory MP, Johnny Mercer, an unconventional method for smuggling contraband into jail, it will also be a chance to question him about the 24 years he has served behind bars.
“For true crime fans this really is one not to miss,” says the publicity for the show, An Evening with Kevin Lane, for which tickets range up to £200. It will also feature Kenny Collins, one of the men convicted of the 2015 Hatton Garden burglary in which more than £14m was stolen from safe deposit boxes by a team of elderly burglars who became known as the “Diamond Wheezers”.
The event in Cambridge on 23 February will be compered by Shaun Attwood, who has himself served six years in an Arizona jail for smuggling ecstasy.
It will be followed next month by a talk at the Conway Hall in central London by the former American mobster Michael Franzese, who is on a “ReMade Man” tour as “the real-life Goodfella”, which will include performances in Wales and Scotland.
Tickets for dining personally with Franzese are available for the unrefusable offer of £999.
While “true crime” has long established itself on television and, more recently, in podcasts, live events like these are part of a new trend in which members of the public get to meet and even – for a little extra cash – have their photos taken with characters who have served time for all manner of crimes.
Lane was convicted of the fatal shooting of Robert Magill in Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire in 1995. He has always protested his innocence and his story was first featured in the Guardian in 2001. It was also the subject of a BBC Panorama programme in 2015.
He is hopeful that his case will return for a second time to the court of appeal. “It is now being submitted again to the Criminal Cases Review Commission,” he says.
What has prompted the Cambridge event?
“I was asked to do a guest appearance at the country club,” said Lane, whose fellow speakers, apart from Collins, are the boxing figures Peter Fury and Matt Legg. “It’s not about glorifying crime. It’s about how we ended up where we ended up.”
Lane can also now be seen on the Anything Goes podcast presented by James English in which he meets a man called Will Gilluley whom he kidnapped and beat up in the early 90s.
Lane, who ran a security company at the time, had grabbed Gilluley having been wrongly informed that he had been involved in a £100,000 robbery in which a pregnant woman had been threatened with a knife.
The attack led Gilluley into a life of addiction and homelessness from which he is only now recovering.
By chance he saw Lane’s face on the Panorama programme which, he said, had brought back the horror of his attack.
After advice from his therapist that he needed to confront his assailant in order to get closure, he contacted the restorative justice organisation Why Me? and this eventually led to their meeting.
“I had no idea what I had done to him until we met,” says Lane, who served two years for the assault, “and what I did to him was terrible. I ruined his life. I have to live with that. It makes me feel ashamed.”
He said that the two men had since become friends – they embrace during the podcast – and he urged other violent criminals, particularly young ones, to go through the same restorative justice programme so that they realise the damage they may cause.
The appetite for live “true crime” experiences seems insatiable. Attwood, who will also compere the Franzese event, says that live true crime events were about to expand when Covid arrived and are now very much on the increase.
Attwood, who has written about his experience in the book Hard Time now talks at schools to warn children of the dangers of drugs.
Later this year, CrimeCon UK, an event at which former detectives, prison officers, criminologists, victims, authors and others talk and debate, will again take place in London and Glasgow.
The publicity for this year’s event asks: “Are you thinking of coming alone? No need to worry, lots of the true crime community are female and attend on their own too. We offer a truly friendly and warm environment to meet like-minded individuals and you are almost 100% guaranteed to make pals for life!”
Outside Liverpool Street station in London can often be seen the doubledecker “Naughty Bus” with the faces of the Kray twins in a front seat.
“Relax and let us entertain you on our gangster-themed tour bus,” is the pitch. For £30, punters will be taken past Pellicci’s cafe on Bethnal Green Road, where the twins used to have their coffees, and visit the Blind Beggar where Ronnie Kray murdered George Cornell in 1966. Hen and stag parties are welcome. Crime, it seems, still pays in many different ways.