Charles Bronson will ‘die in jail’ fears pal as he is ‘positioned in flawed manner’

A prison pal of Britain’s most dangerous inmate Charles Bronson has said he is doomed to die behind bars.

Stephen Gillen, the inspiration for the lead character in the Gangs Of London drama series, believes the violent criminal will never be set free. He told Daily Star Sunday: “Sadly I don’t think he will, Charlie, because Charlie has positioned himself in the wrong way in the media.

“And one thing that I know about the Home Office and the Prison Service like that is they lose people in there and big high-profile people like that who have p***ed them off, they’ll build up a dossier in that way, saying ‘they’re crazy,’ ‘they’re mad,’ they’re this or that.

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“That makes it really, really hard. They layer a case so it makes it really hard for them to get out of that kind of celebrity thing, you know, ‘most dangerous’.”

Bronson, 71, was born Michael Gordon Peterson and has spent most of his life in jail and last year his latest application for parole was rejected. Gillen, 55, got to know him when he himself did a stretch before turning his life around after getting out in 2003 and now makes TV shows.

He said: “I went into that role and of course it locks you in. It’s a very dark place to be and it was very, very serious. You know, it was all the organised crime stuff. And I ended up with three trials at the Old Bailey for armed robbery. The last one there was shots fired and all that stuff, it was a police ambush with the Flying Squad, you know they’d been trying to get us for a while and I got 17 years as a Category A prisoner.

“I got to the point I’d saw through the life. So I didn’t want to hurt anyone anymore, couldn’t do all that stuff anymore, and I had a line in the sand where I knew I was worth so much more. So I didn’t want a life like that no more. This is a s*** life. This is like hell, it was. You can have all of these things but you’re living in hell, really.

“It doesn’t matter what you have, all of this stuff and the money and this and that, you can’t enjoy it because this is the life. It’s not good, right? It’s not good energy. I played by the rules of that life and got out of it and done this. Most people, they went a different way. They grassed up their friends, a lot of them mob guys are in witness protection and this and that. Whatever, I don’t judge anyone but I’m different where I got out of it in a different way.”

Gillen is currently making a Netflix documentary on his life story based on his book Extraordinary with filming scheduled for January and is set to do a true crime series in the States looking at the mob. He was consulted on drama Gangs of London and was one of the inspirations for main character Finn Wallace, played by Colm Meaney, and he is on telly tomorrow in a new doc series with Ross Kemp about the mafia in Britain.

Gillen added: “What we do in this series, it’s all about the Italian mafia’s infiltration of the UK really. Are they there? What’s it about? This programme really details that. One thing with me that’s really valuable is I have the access. I have a lot of unbelievable access to people who wouldn’t normally recount their stories. Because it’s me and they trust me and know we’re going to package it in a right way they come forward and we can do some work.

“I done that on this series, I introduced the team and Ross to someone, I won’t say his name yet but you’ll see it, who is 99 years of age but he was actually Billy Hill’s driver. Now Billy Hill was the real godfather of London.

“You know, the Richardsons earned more money than the Krays, Billy Hill earned more money than both of them together. He was he the predecessor of the Richardsons and the Krays in the old days and in them days you had the Sabinis and all that, they was into the race tracks and the gambling and this is where the mafia come in.

“There’s big names in this, he was talking about people like Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Angelo Bruno, all of these old top league organised crime figures, how they’d come over to London in the day and who they’d met and what really went on, so we talk about that. I take Ross through the Italian Quarter in London, Clerkenwell Road and all that stuff, we worked very well together.”

Ross Kemp: Mafia and Britain begins at 9pm tomorrow (Mon) on Sky History. Stephen Gillen’s book Extraordinary is on sale now.

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