Grandpa, you were a crook

Even as a small boy, Charlie Taylor's direction in life was clear. It was the early 1920s and, while most of his peers were in school, this tough little north Londoner was conning the other truants out of their pocket money.

Placing one of his brothers at the main junction, Charlie would take bets on the number of the next bus to appear around the corner. And, with his brother making secret signs with his rolled-up newspaper, the money rolled in.

Of all the London criminals who rose to prominence during the 1950s and 1960s, the name of Alfred "Charlie" Taylor - unlike that of such friends and contemporaries as the Kray twins and Frankie Fraser - has been forgotten.

The reason for this is unclear: his career was certainly prominent, and his contacts formidable. Yet the book that has finally been written on him is certainly not the one he would have chosen. Granddaughter Lilian Pizzichini - long haunted by his legacy - has exposed him in all his bluster and egotism, his cruelty and flamboyance.

For Taylor - born in the middle of the First World War, the 18th baby of an Irish immigrant and a Willesden labourer - the thrill of the bus-stop scam soon paled. Banished to reform school, he flourished, responding above all to the sense of competition. Here he took up art, wrote essays on Rudyard Kipling and excelled at sport. He attended concerts and other such "dramatic entertainments". "In the process," writes Pizzichini, "he picked up the social niceties which would stand him in such good stead when charming his upper-class marks."

By the time he was in his twenties, he had served time in borstal for theft, become a vociferous supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley and developed a useful line in illegal bookmaking.

And when the war came, he found the perfect environment for his burgeoning line in fraud. "(During the war) he sold you a pup, fiddled your dole and stole your girl in the blink of a flashing eye. He might take her to the dogs or jitterbugging at the Palais de Danse where the décor was bright and breezy. There was fun to be had in this war."

By the 1950s, Taylor had wormed his way into the affections of the upper classes. He would seduce the wives, then rip off their husbands. Gradually, his success saw his addresses becoming ever more salubrious. In the early 1960s, the family was living in Bayswater, "an exciting place to be, full of callgirls and warring minicab drivers, oriental tradesmen and beatniks". By the end of the decade, no less a house than the W8 mansion, 1 Inverness Gardens, had become the family home and it was to here that, as an impressionable child, Pizzichini remembers being brought.

It was in Kensington that, around the gambling tables, MPs and aristocrats drank champagne with rock stars, and high-ranking detectives brushed shoulders with men like Teddy Machin, famed for his dextrous use of a razor-blade. And at the centre of it all - mixing drugs, crime and adultery - loomed the menacing figure of Taylor. His charisma was legendary: at one point, he was dating 18-year-old Rosemary Frankland, England's first Miss World, who, in May 1965 - the month Pizzichini was born - left him for Bob Hope.

In Pizzichini's hands, the story of her grandfather's rise to criminal prominence - and later fall into unlamented disgrace and penury - is breathless and compelling. Dead Men's Wages - named after a building-trade scam where wages are paid into the accounts of dead men and then creamed off by the likes of Taylor - is as much a picture of the power of the London criminal underworld as it is a slice of metropolitan social history. Harrow Road, we learn at one point, was "once a crooked horse track used by the Celts". But it is also a book that speaks of a deeply troubled past.

Taylor was Pizzichini's mother's stepfather, and left little good behind him. Now, 24 years after his death, his memory still sickens. "The realisation of a lifetime of lies," Pizzichini writes, "comes rushing over me." Yet, thankfully, he is history: despite her earlier attraction to her "handsome young grandfather", that is, in the end, about the only good thing Pizzichini can say about him. "You see, Charlie, ultimately, no one cared enough. We were tired of your depravity."