London's crime leader

Unsettling thoughts occurred as I reached the end of Hit 'Em Hard, the story of Jack Spot, King of the Underworld. All the unwelcome detail of the razor slashes he inflicted on his victims' buttocks (they can't sit down for weeks or the stitches open) and the stabbings and beatings he doled out or ordered over three decades to the end of the 1950s, called to mind not history, but everyday life now.

The inheritors of Jack Spot's bloodsoaked mantle are with us today. The name of London's current King of the Underworld is well-known to the police, most journalists and a large section of the public. Like Spot, this individual thrives on violent crime and like Spot, he appears untouchable. Wensley Clarkson's book deals with recent history, but he might just as easily have been describing the present.

The immutable nature of crime is perhaps not something to be wondered at, but it is depressing to contemplate that, over a period that saw polio, Nazi tyranny and drainpipe trousers vanquished, the scumbag gang boss is still with us. The last time I described a London gangster pejoratively in print I got a letter from a reader saying he was a diamond geezer and I was a coward. The letter was sent anonymously.

I imagine this person will rush out to buy the Jack Spot story. There is a significant section of the population, even today, which holds to the belief that with people like Spot around children were safe on the streets, you could leave your front door unlocked and there was always something for the OAPs at Christmas.

Clarkson's book will do little to dispel this nostalgia. Spot, whose real name was Comer, was born in an East End tenement in 1912. He grew up in the depression years and quite literally fought his way to the leadership of a criminal gang. He was a cruel bruiser, but he had organising flair and recruited crooks to enforce a protection racket that took in most of England's major racecourses.

Fleecing bookies was extremely profitable and Spot was soon living in a large flat in Marylebone, dressing in handmade suits and being driven around London in a Cadillac convertible.

As he expanded his criminal organisation, Spot inevitably encountered opposition from other gangsters. He and his men dealt with this using their weapon of choice, the cutthroat razor.

The dust jacket of the book carries a photograph of Spot with a livid scar running down his forehead, over his left eye, along his nose to his top lip. The long description of his fight with rival villain Albert Dimes is one of the most harrowing passages in the book.

The narrative is built on interviews, police, court and newspaper archives with substantial input from Spot's own memoirs. The book really becomes compelling when Spot's nemesis, the cunning gangster Billy Hill, enters the fray. In the early 1950s Hill challenged Spot for supremacy and the story of the battle for control of London's organised crime is gripping.

Some of the characters are priceless. The Rev Basil Andrews, for example, was a silver-haired vicar who used confidence trickery to finance a bad drink and gambling habit. His phoney evidence got Spot off a charge of causing grievous bodily harm at the Old Bailey, although the "Knocking Vicar" as he was called was later jailed for perjury. An important player during the confrontation with Billy Hill was Frankie Fraser, then a young hard man whose exceptional violence earned him the nickname Mad Frankie.