Hanging out with some creative crims.
I am sitting in a former public toilet in Spitalfields, rain pelting the pavement overhead. Around a narrow table draped in black velvet, some of Britain’s most notorious criminals – now artists – have gathered to launch their initiative for former inmates, Rogues Gallery. By dint of the weather (and the DIY approach to launch PR), it’s just me, alone in the basement, with the rogues.
To my left is Contra, 64, avuncular and softly spoken – his alias an anagram of ‘con art’, his real name withheld for legal reasons. Beyond him sits Paddy Maguire, wrongly imprisoned in 1976 at the age of fourteen for a series of IRA pub bombings – one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in British legal history.
To Maguire’s left, facing me, is one of the ringleaders of the 2015 Hatton Garden heist, dripped out in surprisingly fresh black gorpwear. The robbery was notable for the astonishingly advanced age of those involved: the so-called ‘diamond wheezers’ had a combined 448 years between them. Like Contra, his identity has to be fudged; for ease of reading, we’ll call him the Gardener.
Next comes Louis Simpson, a boyish but frazzled veteran of the acid house scene. As a teenager in the 1990s, he shuttled joyfully between Ibiza and Britain, until he was caught carrying 4,000 ecstasy tablets through Barcelona airport and sentenced to four‑and‑a‑half years in the city’s fearsome La Model prison. His colourful abstracts now fill the far wall.
Standing behind us is Kevin Hanley – once labelled by a judge as Britain’s ‘top, top man’ in the drug world and, incidentally, Simpson’s uncle. Before I arrived he told me about the untapped talent he saw inside: how he would visit the Gardener’s ‘peter’ (cell) and marvel at the work. Leaning on my right shoulder is the irrepressibly cockney Ronnie Parry, bankrolling the scheme through his business, Gartree Galleries, itself named after a Category B prison in Market Harborough. Every man here has done time; some met on the street, others on the inside.
Contra, who co-founded Rogues Gallery alongside Parry, opens the discussion. ‘We’d like to be the bridge between the inside and the outside,’ he tells me, ‘so that, having come home, if you’re talented enough, we’ll try and find a space for you.’
The collective hopes to steer ex‑offenders away from recidivism through giving their art a platform. They want to get the word out (or rather, in) through Inside Time, the weekly prison paper, and eventually plan to show serving prisoners’ work – culminating, they hope, in an exhibition at the House of Lords. The peer, John Bird, founder of The Big Issue and once a prisoner himself, backs their cause; he spoke here on opening night.
‘We’d like local businesses or the art world to support us,’ Parry sighs, evidently preoccupied with slow sales. ‘Everyone’s saying what a good idea it is, but we need to turn that into reality, where we can actually sell paintings, and galleries will take our artists.’
Not all the artists are amateurs. Simpson received training at Chelsea College of Arts before he was imprisoned, though he tempers that he was ‘mostly selling puff’ aged 16 before dropping out. Less modestly, he tells me that they called him the ‘Pequeño Picasso’ in La Model. ‘I did have two exhibitions whilst I was incarcerated. I was obviously unable to attend, but my mum went – she got the local paper laminated.’
Simpson was allowed three hours a day to paint. ‘The bars melted. I was away,’ he says. The others had to make do with one hour per week, and would have to get creative with materials: bed sheets, tea bags, ketchup. Guards often left Contra in the art room, he says, because it was easier to manage him that way – although rumours of his status as ‘top boy’ may have helped him earn that reprieve.
For Maguire, who was falsely imprisoned along with six of his family members, art is a chance to keep correcting the record. ‘We campaigned for nearly 30 years to get our names cleared,’ he says. ‘When I’d bump into people who know the family’s story, they’d say “How’s mum?” “How’s the case going?” Now, when I meet people, they all go, “Alright Pat, how’s the art going?” So for me, I’m more than that story.’
The Gardener’s past is harder to leave behind: earnings over a certain threshold are seized by the government as restitution for the heist. He can, however, donate his earnings as charity; in this instance, he’s giving the money towards the gallery’s rent. ‘Everything’s a challenge with me,’ he concedes, ‘but I’ve really enjoyed doing this painting and that’. During his final year inside, the Gardener met a forger who encouraged him to try watercolours, despite him never having painted in his life. ‘Within seven months, I was knocking things out like that,’ he says, waving a fat finger at one of his florid wall-pieces.
Expressing yourself on canvas is one thing; exhibiting your work as a former criminal is another, as Parry laments. ‘You’ll always get the blue rinse brigade who think that we shouldn’t be hanging paintings; they think we should be hanging from a lamppost,’ he says. ‘What do they want us to do?’ Contra interjects. ‘This is our answer to the Daily Mail readers. Yeah, we’re ex-convicts – have we got to sweep the roads, and that’s all we can do?’
For these artistic rogues, painting represents a credible coda as they settle into a life beyond temptation, resisting the pull of that one last Big Job. The Gardener tells me he likes to paint in a gazebo that looks out across a river, just north of London. ‘The boats go past me like that,’ he says, bobbing his hand serenely through the open air. ‘It’s fantastic.’
