Francis Fraser, a British underworld enforcer known as Mad Frankie, whose life of crime and torture led to a lucrative retirement chronicling his own grisly deeds in books, films and lectures, on stage and television, and as a “gangland” tour guide, died on Wednesday in London. He was 90.
His death was announced on his official website. British news organizations said he died at King’s College Hospital in South London, where he had been admitted for a hip or leg operation and slipped into a coma on Friday resulting from complications during surgery.
Eddie Richardson, the head of a crime family with which he once worked, told The Associated Press, “He’s had a long life, and I don’t think he’s done too bad.”
Mr. Fraser is well remembered in the back streets of South London, where he sadistically worked over many a victim with ax and pliers, and in West End theaters and broadcast studios, where he drew audiences into the raptures of villainy with accounts of his exploits from the 1930s into the ’80s.
Capitalizing on public fascination with the macabre, he made a remarkable transition from criminal and prison life to author and celebrity, becoming a household name in Britain in his 70s. His oeuvre included six ghostwritten books, a feature film, a documentary about his life, television and stage shows, newspaper and magazine articles, DVDs, CDs, university lectures and dinner talks.
Many Americans, too, may recall his London and British bus tours, showing gawkers the prisons where he served time, the country mansions he looted, his old haunts and robbery scenes, places where gangs clashed and he was shot, and where, he said, he had maimed and killed scores of people.
It was hard to tell how much of it was true, but Mr. Fraser was an engaging performer: a small, wiry character with menacing eyes under bushy brows, a face lined with the crags of knife scars and punches, and a cockney twang that conveyed the ring of authenticity. His story, told in person, on his website, and in police, court and penal records, was cheerfully gruesome.
While officials called him Britain’s most dangerous criminal, suspected in as many as 40 killings, Mr. Fraser was tried for murder only once, in 1966. The case was dropped after a key witness experienced a memory lapse. But years later, Mr. Fraser told Seth Linder, a freelance writer, what had happened.
“It was that lovely fight at Mr. Smith’s nightclub,” Mr. Fraser said. “This guy shot me in the thigh. The police alleged I took the gun from him and killed him, which, of course, I did. I wasn’t going to pat him on the back, was I?”
His exploits began in childhood with street fights, shoplifting and muggings. He became an army deserter and black marketeer during World War II, then a smash-and-grab jewelry thief. In the 1960s, he graduated to armed robberies, kidnapping and strong-arm duties for a vicious London gang led by Mr. Richardson and a brother, Charlie.
The gang’s members ran extortion and protection rackets, with mock trials, torture and sometimes death for those who did not pay up. The authorities said they liked to remove victims’ toes with bolt cutters. For disloyalty to the gang, they prescribed blowtorches and whippings. Mr. Fraser’s specialty was nailing people to the floor and extracting their teeth with pliers.
Convicted of 26 crimes, including prison riots and attacks on guards and inmates, he said he served 42 years behind bars and was certified insane three times, although he insisted that he had faked madness to lighten punishments with hospital stays. He probably exaggerated his prison time.
Mr. Fraser was part of a London underworld riddled with a generation of cockney gangsters in bespoke suits, like the Richardsons and the Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie, whose names and pictures were as likely to be found in the society pages as in the crime sheets.
He described matter-of-fact brutality on his website. Under “The Chopping of Eric Mason,” a thug who threatened to accuse him falsely of starting a pub brawl, he related: “I kidnapped him and threw him in the motor, took him to our headquarters, Atlantic Machines, and chopped him up with me chopper, me ax. Then took him to the London Hospital and dumped him out there with a blanket around him.”
In “Mad Frank’s Diary: A Chronicle of the Life of Britain’s Most Notorious Villain” (2000), he was more circumspect: “Sometimes when I’m signing books I’m asked how many people I’ve killed, and I reply that the police say 40, and I’m not going to argue with them.”
Francis Davidson Fraser was born in South London on Dec. 13, 1923, one of five children of a Canadian seaman and an Irish washerwoman. He grew up in poverty in a Roman Catholic household, where he learned to recite prayers in Latin. At 17 he was sent to Borstal, the juvenile detention center, where he was birched for attacking a guard.
His prison terms, for assault, torture, robbery, extortion and rioting, ranged from two to 10 years and were so frequent that he rarely spent more than a few years at large. In a prison library, he discovered books. “I used to love P. G. Wodehouse — Jeeves and all that,” he told Mr. Linder. “In fact, that’s what gave me the idea to start doing country houses.”
He said he helped plan, but did not otherwise join in, the 2.6-million-pound “Great Train Robbery” in 1963, then the largest cash heist in British history. In prison, he met Irish Republican Army terrorists, and at Brixton in 1968 he encountered James Earl Ray, then awaiting extradition to the United States for the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr. Fraser said little about his home life. One memoir cited three sons, Frank Jr., David and Patrick, “from an early relationship,” and another son, Francis, “from a marriage to Doreen.” In recent decades, he lived in South London with Marilyn Wisbey, the daughter of Tommy Wisbey, a Great Train Robbery culprit. Information about his survivors was not available.
In 1991, Mr. Fraser was shot in the head outside a London nightclub. He insisted that the assailant, never caught, had acted for corrupt officials who wanted to silence his new career as an author and entertainer.
Besides “Mad Frank’s Diary,” his books, all ghostwritten by James Morton, included “Mad Frank: Memoirs of a Life of Crime” (1994), “Mad Frank and Friends” (1999), “Mad Frank’s Britain” and “Mad Frank’s London” (both 2002), and “Mad Frank’s Underworld History of Britain” (2007).
He acted in a dozen television shows and several theatrical productions, and in 1999 appeared in a one-man show in London, “An Evening With Mad Frankie Fraser,” which later toured Britain. He also appeared as an East End crime boss in the 1996 feature film “Hard Men,” and in a 2007 documentary, “Mad Frank.”
In interviews, he remained almost nonchalant about his life of crime, saying the general public had little to fear.
“Sure I was violent,” Mr. Fraser told the British newspaper The Independent in 1994, “but only to people like myself.”
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