Читать книгу Scottish Hard Bastards - Jimmy Holland & Stephen Richards - Страница 8

What I am about to tell you is not fiction; these are all real-life hard bastards who have a strong desire for blood and guts. I am going to start this chapter with my friend Malkie (Malcolm) Leggat, a convicted killer who once led a five-day prison riot.

I first heard Malkie’s name when I was a fresh-faced young offender. So young, in fact, that my face was still covered in acne. I would go as far as to say that I was still wet behind the ears. Even back then, Malkie’s name kept popping up like some sort of superstar’s until, one day, my curiosity got the better of me. I started to ask some of the older boys in the young offenders (Young Offenders’ Institute) why Malkie’s name kept being flung around so regularly.

One of the top boys, Aldo Aitkenhead, who I didn’t really know at that time, but who went on to make quite a name for himself in prison – I’ll tell you more about him later – told me the story about Malkie.

Malkie had just been in Scotland’s worst-ever prison riot and hostage war. In September 1987, at Peterhead Jail in the northeast of Scotland, just one year into the life sentence he had received at Glasgow High Court in August 1986 for killing twenty-three-year-old James Sweeney outside a Glasgow hotel, Malkie and his good friend Sammo took the prison warden, Jackie Stewart, hostage at knifepoint. On another occasion, Malkie, a staunch football fan, stabbed two prison officers after they refused to let him watch Rangers play in a European match… he received an extra three years for that.

Aberdeenshire’s Peterhead Jail housed the hardest, baddest, meanest, motherfucker prisoners in the Scottish prison system. Because of this, no one was surprised when the pressure-pot jail finally erupted into a display of violence that has not been seen or equalled since.

After being taken hostage, the prison warden was in a very bad way, both mentally and physically. He had suffered beatings, starvation and humiliation. He had his key chain wrapped around his neck and was paraded around the jail’s 90ft-high rooftop above D-wing like a dog. By this stage, the warden was a broken man: he sat with his hands on his knees, constantly wiping the tears of terror from his weather-beaten face.

Malkie didn’t seem to give a fuck for human life and, as he had just been sentenced to life, had nothing to lose from his rampage of madness on the rooftop.

The siege went on for five days before the SPS lost total control, at which point they had no choice but to inform the government, which was, at the time, led by the Iron Lady – Margaret Thatcher.

Malkie and Sammo must have certainly got up their noses, because Thatcher instructed the most feared fighting force the world has ever seen to bring Malkie and his unstoppable gang to justice. Thatcher was at one of her biggest Conservative Party weekends and there, live on television, was Malkie, jumping around on the prison rooftops and threatening to smash Jackie Stewart’s head in with a claw hammer before flinging him off the roof to his death.

Maggie was the only person in Britain who could give the SAS their direct orders to storm the prison and so, when negotiations broke down, the government’s crisis management Cabinet group, Cobra, headed by the then-Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, dispatched the SAS under the cover of darkness to rescue Jackie Stewart and to round up Malkie, Sammo and the rest of their little gang of troublemakers.

No one was expecting the six-man team of elite SAS soldiers to storm the prison, but that is exactly what happened. Hurling stun grenades and tear gas canisters, they entered the jail through a skylight and freed the terrified prison warder.

I have talked to most of the people that were involved and every single one of them has said that they didn’t hear or see a thing. And when they did, it was too late!

The SAS flung flash bombs at Sammo, little Jake Devin and some of the others to blind them and to stun them for long enough to allow the men in black to take control of the hall. Jake was flung over the top flat balcony, some 40ft up, fell onto his back and was severely injured. The riot screws didn’t give a monkey’s about the state he was in. They dragged him by his hair into the first open cell and then proceeded to strip and beat him. Malkie was the last ringleader to surrender. He and Sammo were repeatedly coshed over their heads by the riot screws’ batons, before being bundled into empty cells on the bottom flat of the hall. Once they were there, they received some of the worst beatings that have been dished out from the riot screws.

Once the screws left, most of the six or seven boys who had been overpowered by the SAS were in no fit state to move, never mind talk. In May 1988, Malkie, Sammo and one other boy received a total of twenty-seven years between them for mobbing, rioting and assault. Malkie had a total of twelve years added to his sentence and was ordered to spend two-and-a-half years in total solitary. After he had done that, he was moved to HMP Shotts and wasted no time in getting his own back on the screws.

One day, Malkie walked into their office and pulled out a lock-back knife. The screws froze on their chairs, before Malkie plunged the knife deep into their chests and bellies. After he had done it, he walked calmly out of the office and told the other boys in the section that he had just stabbed the hell out of two wardens.

One of the injured screws managed to raise the alarm before he fell onto the office floor. When he was finally taken to hospital, after having lost three pints of blood, it was discovered that the other warden wasn’t as badly hurt as had first appeared.

Malkie was taken back down to the segregation unit, where he spent the next four-and-a-half years. On his release, the screws asked him whether he would like to go to the Shotts special unit, which had been opened in a blaze of glory back in 1991.

The unit housed the prisoners that the Scottish prison system couldn’t handle – as much for their own safety as for the safety of the prison wardens and the other convicts. Once he was there, Malkie adapted to some normality: he didn’t need to stab any more screws or cons; he was in a safe, controlled unit and he flourished, so much so that after three-and-a-half years, he left to go back into mainstream prison. This time, however, his head was screwed on the right way round.

Malkie was making good progress when he was moved onto Pentland Hall, down in HMP Saughton, and he got his tariff date of eighteen years – he had already served twenty years, but the system did not think that he was ready for release.

Nearing the end of his sentence, and still in a progressive move, he was being prepared for a move to an open prison when, in March 2005, he failed to return to Gateside Jail in Greenock while on a work community placement with, would you believe, the Salvation Army.

Ten weeks after he absconded, Malkie was captured in a slick operation when heavily armed police, backed by dog handlers and a force helicopter, swooped on him in Llanfaes, Anglesey, Wales. Unbelievably, Malkie had just moved in with a woman he had met only days after going on the run at a party.

With some luck, he can soon walk out of the prison gates a free man. He has done more than his fair share of time the hard way. On a scale of one to ten, Malkie is definitely a ten: his violence and his escapades are legendary within the prison system.