‘BLACK WIDOW’ GANGSTER ON HER
FUR coats filled her wardrobe and a string of lovers filled her heart… but it would all come crashing down for the Black Widow.
Linda Calvey, who counts mobster Reggie Kray among her suitors, lived it up for years as an armed robber who learned the ropes from her first husband.
She is said to have netted £ 1million from crime – a conservative estimate, maybe, given her own boast that she netted £100,000 a raid.
Linda started out as a getaway driver, then became a gun-toting robber herself.
Now 71, the woman who served 18 years for murdering one of her fellas is telling all in new book Black Widow.
Talking about her past as a robber, Linda told the Sunday Mirror: “The first time I was a driver. But then I would go in with a gun.
“I was the silent one. I never used to speak during the robberies as I didn’t want them to know I was a woman, so I would just stand back and hold it. I was disguised with a balaclava and was meant to be the menacing one.”
LURED
Linda, who served time with killers Rose West and Myra Hindley, added: “Planning would take months and the robbery would take minutes.
“The police would say it’s ‘ Black Widow’s gang’ and they were my gang. “They called me ‘ lady boss’.”
The Black Widow tag comes from her string of relationships. Most of the men who have fallen for her charms have wound up in prison or dead.
Linda says: “I was a seductress. I lured men in with my web. And I always knew when I got one.”
She was even proposed to by fellow killer Kray while in jail. They had met in a club before he was nicked in 1968.
Years later, when Linda was also in jail, Kray got in touch.
She explains: “He wrote to me and told me to be strong. Through my brother, who was locked up with him, we became pen pals.
“He then started phoning me twice a week and I used to get bouquets from him. He sent me trainers once.
“And then he asked me to marry him over the phone. I said it wasn’t good for either of us – really thinking it wouldn’t be good for me as I’d still be sitting there now if I was Mrs Kray.
“I even made him a house in pottery class as his dream was to get home before he died. He was a romantic soul, and very quietly spoken.”
Kray died in 2000 aged 66, five years after mob twin Ronnie passed away.
Linda’s lust for crime was fuelled when first husband Mickey Calvey was shot dead by the Flying Squad during an armed raid on a supermarket in 1978.
He was nicknamed The Fonz after the character in TV’s Happy Days.
Calvey’s gang plotted their raids in Linda’s kitchen as she made tea and sarnies. She maintains that she only got involved in the hard stuff after the death of Mickey, father of her children Melanie, 49, and Neil, 45. Linda says: “He was shot in the back and I became so bitter. I just wanted revenge.
“When he was in his coffin I spoke to him and said, ‘I will do what you died doing and I will provide for our children’. And I decided I would become what I did become that day.
“My love for him made me go crazy. On the outside I was me but on the inside I was a demon. I wanted to avenge my husband and in my mind that was doing armed robberies as he got killed doing one, however strange that sounds.
“I was always attracted to money. The first time I robbed a bank I got addicted. My feet felt like they weren’t on the floor, it was a rush.”
BUBBLE
Linda – who told her kids not to follow her into a life of crime – says she committed around 30 robberies, adding: “I got around 100 grand a robbery – and we did loads.
“It was very glamorous. I had a whole wardrobe of fur coats.”
Linda hails from Stepney and became queen of the underworld in London’s East End. She hooked up with fellow crook Ronnie Cook. “Ron came and took my life over, I was in a bubble,” she recalls. But in 1981 he was jailed for 16 years for robbery.
Linda promised to wait for him and got a tattoo on her leg which read: “True Love Ron Cook.”
However, she started an affair with her partner-in-crime Brian Thorogood – who is also now dead – and ended up serving a three-year stint for involvement in a robbery herself.
Linda says: “We got caught because Brian’s wife had him followed by a private detective. They saw us on a robbery and reported it to the police.
“The cops said I was so good they’d never have caught me and I thought, ‘ Well, at least that’s something!’” It was only then, Linda says, that the gravity of her actions hit her.
She adds: “First time I thought about anyone else was when I got arrested at my brother’s flat.
“A policeman had a gun to my face and it was horrific. It made me think,
I wore a mask and didn’t say a word... I was the menacing robber... I was addicted to it LINDA CALVEY BLACK WIDOW WHO CARRIED OUT 30 RAIDS