He was called “the managing director of British crime”, “the mean machine”, “the undertaker” and “brown bread Fred”, but Freddie Foreman, who has died aged 94, would have preferred to be known as just “one of the chaps”. As a member of the Krays’ gang in the 1960s he literally got away with murder, and as part of the team involved in one of the biggest robberies of the 80s he nearly got away with a share of £7m.
In 1965 Foreman murdered “Ginger” Marks, whom he shot dead in revenge after Marks had been involved in the non-fatal shooting of Foreman’s brother, George, over a domestic matter. In 1966 he also shot dead Frank “the mad axeman” Mitchell, whom the Krays had sprung from Dartmoor prison but who had become a threat to them. Although many years later Foreman admitted the killings, he was cleared in court of both.
However, he was less fortunate over his involvement in the Krays’ murder of Jack “the Hat” McVitie in 1967. Foreman had played only a peripheral role in the crime by dumping the body, but was jailed for 10 years in 1969 for doing so.
He had disposed of McVitie in the same way he had got rid of Marks: wrapped in chicken wire attached to weights, and dumped at sea. After eventually confessing to the killings of Marks and Mitchell on television, Foreman was arrested in 2000 but never charged; he was a beneficiary of the old double jeopardy rule – since changed – under which no-one could be charged with the same offence twice.
The youngest of five brothers, Foreman came from Irish stock on his father, Herbert’s, side; his mother, Lou, was from a middle-class London family. They lived in Sheepcote Lane in Battersea, south London, and he grew up in awe of the local bare-knuckle street fighters, his father among them. His Foreman grandmother also regularly fought neighbours after a night out at the pub. While his father taught him that it was acceptable to hit policemen but not to talk to them, his maternal uncle would become chief constable of Durham.
During the second world war, while his elder brothers went off to fight, Freddie was evacuated to Woking, Northampton and then Hove, where he first learned how to thieve. Back in London, where the family home was destroyed by a bomb, he broke into stores during air-raids. At 14, while working for South Western Railways as a delivery driver’s assistant, he was entranced by the sight and value of the gold bars they had to transport. A seed was sown. Work in a warehouse and as a scaffolder followed, but a criminal life beckoned. By 16 he had already made his first Old Bailey appearance, found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm during a fight in a youth club, for which he was fined £5.
Like many of his criminal contemporaries, he dodged national service by pretending to be mad, although later in life he regretted missing out on the possible adventures it had to offer. A potential career as a boxer – he was once on the same bill as the heavyweight champion Henry Cooper – was derailed by his delinquent life. He was a versatile criminal, acting as a minder to a legendary female shoplifting gang, the Forty Thieves, on their Harrods raids, carrying out smash-and-grab robberies, and operating as a prolific “jump-up” merchant – stealing from vans and lorries as they unloaded.
He was a friend of many of those who took part in the 1963 Great Train Robbery but always denied being “the one that got away”, although he later helped both Ronnie Biggs and Buster Edwards to escape. Meanwhile, he was committing security van robberies and becoming involved with the Krays.
Foreman did occasionally make some money legally, through property deals, betting shops and a pub and, after completing his McVitie sentence and on the run with a false passport, he moved to the US, where he ran a successful vending machine business in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He eventually returned to London, but in 1982 moved to Marbella in Spain, where he ran a club and had Bobby Charlton and Max Bygraves as neighbours. His marriage to Maureen (nee Puttnam), his childhood sweetheart and the mother of his three children, had ended by then, and in Spain he met Janice King, who would become his long-term partner.
The Costa del Crime life came to an end in 1989 when he was arrested in connection with the £7m Security Express robbery in east London, carried out in 1983. He was extradited, protesting furiously, to stand trial. Convicted of handling the proceeds, he was jailed for nine years. In all he spent a total of 16 years behind bars.
During his first long prison stretch, Foreman became a friend of Gerry Conlon, one of the wrongly imprisoned Guildford Four. When Foreman was re-arrested, the two met again in Brixton prison. Foreman had just heard the news that the Crown was not going to contest the Guildford Four’s appeal and told Conlon the glad tidings. A sceptical Conlon did not believe him, so Foreman sat him down for a cup of tea and waited for the news to come on the radio. “To experience someone’s joy like that is unbelievable,” he said later.
After Foreman’s final release he moved to Shoot-Up Hill – of course – in Cricklewood, north London, and worked on his memoirs. At a boxing match he bumped into Leonard “Nipper” Read, the detective who cracked the Krays and was chairman of the British Boxing Board of Control, reporting that “he said ‘no hard feelings’ and I said ‘no hard feelings’”. Nipper, he recalled, “treated me fairly, never tried to fit me up.” Foreman became a regular interviewee in gangland documentaries and was a consultant on the 2015 Krays film, Legend, starring Tom Hardy.
As for being the MD of British crime, “that was the publisher’s idea,” he told me of the subtitle of his first memoir, Respect, published in 1996, for which he was paid £10,000 and which was launched at the Cafe Royal. “They were coming up with terrible names like The Enforcer – but that’s the name applied to someone who works for someone else. I wanted it to be called One of the Chaps.” Three more volumes covering much the same ground followed: Brown Bread Fred (2007); The Godfather of British Crime (2009); and The Last Real Gangster, published in 2015 with a foreword by Hardy.
He sent his children to private schools and was proud that they did not follow in his footsteps. His son, Jamie, became a successful actor, notably in EastEnders and in films such as Layer Cake and Gangster No 1.
He is survived by Janice and by his children, Gregory, Jamie and Danielle.
• Frederick Foreman, criminal, born 5 March 1932; died 10 October 2026
• Duncan Campbell died in 2025
