200 Banks and 30 Years Inside: Noel 'Razor' Smith in His Own Words

James English interviews Noel "Razor" Smith, who robbed more than 200 banks and spent over 30 years in prison, on the Anything Goes show. Smith describes a childhood in north London and then south London as the son of Irish immigrants from Dublin, and a first robbery at 14 that left him with little more than a box of Beatles records. At 14 he and a friend were picked up by a local burglary squad, assaulted, and made to admit to 62 burglaries; a magistrate ordered an investigation and the charges were dropped, but he says the family became a target afterwards. The interview covers the sentences that followed, including a detention centre at 15, and the years in which he could not read at all until he taught himself from the books he was allowed in prison. He describes escaping from a C-category prison only to learn he had been granted parole and would have been released two days later, and how the Flying Squad came to nickname his crew the laughing bank robbers. The later sections deal with four refused paroles, the prison therapy that led him to write a 900-page autobiography in three months, the journalism diploma and law A-level he took while inside, and the columns he has since written for the Guardian, the Independent and the Big Issue. He was ten years out of prison at the time of recording and has published several books. The account is his own throughout: his allegations about police conduct and about his treatment in custody are his testimony and have not been independently verified here. Credit: Anything Goes With James English, Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). https://www.crimebook.org/products