Billy Hill was Britain's first celebrity gangster. Born in London's King's Cross, Hill was a charming character with a deadly edge who elevated himself to the top of the pantheon of organised crime. By the early 50's he had control of the city's gambling rackets & masterminded a heist that set the template for the Great Train Robbery.

There will never be another Billy Hill - Reggie Kray. Bill had a great brain. There's no two ways about it - Frankie Fraser. I made Billy Hill. Then he got over the top of me. I should have shot Billy Hill. I really should. I'd have got ten years for it but it would have made me happy and I'd be out now - laughing - Jack Spot. I have no doubt that during his career Hill had some very senior officers in his pocket - Leonard 'Nipper' Read, legendary Scotland Yard detective. Billy Hill was Britain's first celebrity gangster. Born in London's impoverished Seven Dials, by the early 1950's he had control of the city's gambling rackets and masterminded a heist that set the template for the Great Train Robbery. He ruled the roost in the bloody era when the underworld's choice of weapon was the open razor. His violent clashes with onetime ally turned enemy Jack Spot became the stuff of legend, as Hill and his henchmen left the streets of Soho running red. But Hill was astute enough to choose his moment to get out, abdicating in favour of his gun-toting young protégés, the Kray twins . . . In this fast-moving biography, Wensley Clarkson charts the life of the only post-war British villain to truly make crime pay.

This is the memoir of Billy and Gyp Hill - Britain's most successful criminal couple - and Justin, their only child. Billy was the Boss of Britain's underworld. He introduced 'project' crime to Britain and got clean away with the 1952 Eastcastle Street robbery even though the authorities knew that he did it. In 1956, he was at the centre of a phone tapping scandal that led to a Privy Council enquiry. When Billy published his memoir, the papers said there had been nothing like it since the days of Al Capone.

In August 1955 two men fought on the corner of Frith Street and Old Compton Street, Soho. From the dreadful injuries they inflicted on each other it easily could have been a hanging matter, but ironically it became known as 'The Fight that Never Was'. It was, however, to have enormous repercussions in the battle for control of Soho and its clubs and for the bookmakers' pitches on the racecourses. It also led to the inexorable rise of the Kray twins. One of the men fighting was Jack Spot, the self-proclaimed defender of the Jewish community against Fascism. The other was the half Italian Albert Dimes, the right hand man of Spot's one-time friend and later nemesis Billy Hill, rightly described as the nearest Britain has ever had to a mastermind. Meticulously researched, including interviews with the survivors of the era, this is the story of the rise and fall of Spot from an East End background and Hill from a criminal family in Holborn, as well as that of their spiritual mentor Darby Sabini, the King of the Racecourses in the 1920s and 1930s and his successors Alf and Harry White.