Stanley Lowe, former con-man and graduate of almost every major gaol in the country, is about to descend on Oxford University to lecture the men he calls "the Home Secretaries of tomorrow."
Mr Lowe, who once sold the Champs-Elysées for cash, has been invited to be the first speaker at a new Oxford Forum – a platform for writers whose work has appeared in "Isis."
His message will be simple: that Britain's gaols are an anachronism; that, except for one, they did not do him much good; and that "the British criminal receives a far more expensive education in crime than undergraduates at Oxford do for their degrees." He should know.
His years "inside" began at 14. "I want to tell people that there's nothing clever about sitting in the jug half your life," he says. "All this talk of glamour about crime is a load of rubbish."
He talks about his early life quickly. "My dad was killed and my mother poisoned herself. At 12 I was sent to an orphanage in Hornsey. By 14 I was going round the East End. I'd got in with a crowd of tea leafs. We used to do all the fiddles. I got nicked."
In 1938 he was in America, already a budding confidence trickster. In a bar he met "The Doc" – "a brilliant, fabulous con-man." He was trying to sell me Brooklyn Bridge. I tried to sell him Times Square. Finally we called it quits. Then I became his protege." That led to an American sentence – for forging and issuing £5,000 worth of dollars – and then deportation.
Paris was the meeting place for con-men like Stanley Lowe, "Snakehips" Johnson, and the Wolfes. It was there that he met the American oil man. "I can sniff out money; always have been able to; I got him in a second. I bought him a drink.
"I told him I was in films. The net result was that I sold him part-ownership of the Champs-Elysées for £2,500 with nothing on paper."
His last sentence, for forging travellers' cheques, was reduced from 10 years to three on appeal. "I realised how lucky I was. It was the last one. I know if I come up again they'll throw the book at me. I don't want to die in gaol."
His resolution to go straight was greatly helped, he says, by the experimental rehabilitation scheme in Wandsworth. There prisoners are on trust, cell doors are not locked, and at weekends they do voluntary work outside.
"That's the reason I've kept free of trouble."
