https://romanroadlondon.com/linda-calvey-black-widow-gangster/..‘Black Widow’ Linda Calvey on the realities of East End gangster life. July 14, 2019 Frederick O'Brien 5030 Views  0 Comments Features  10 min read.Flowery dress. Red toenails. Bleached blonde hair. Linda Calvey, 71, doesn’t exactly scream East London gangster when we meet on Roman Road, but most people would know better than to argue with her resume. She’s been a getaway driver and armed robber. Reggie Kray proposed to her once, though she told him not to be silly. Eleven years ago she completed an 18-year prison sentence for killing her partner, a charge she denies to this day..Calvey has written a book spanning her childhood in Stepney to the present day – The Black Widow. She has done so for two reasons. One, to take ownership of her own story, and two, to clear her name. Calvey owns up to all her crimes but one. She hopes by telling her own story she will inspire figures from her past to come forward and vindicate her. .You tend to get two extremes when talking with people about East London’s criminal underworld, neither quite complete. Some shrug it off as an irredeemable period of violence, poverty, and corruption, while others drift to romantic pictures of plucky, streetwise cockneys finding success in the only ways available to them. .Having gone from a loving childhood to bank robber to convict, Calvey has lived both sides of that world, and she wanted to give the full picture..‘I didn’t want to sugar coat it,’ she says. ‘It’s not glamorous, it’s not wonderful. It’s terrible. While you’re doing these things you think it’s fantastic, but the flipside is a totally different story. When they say crime doesn’t pay, in 95% of cases it really doesn’t.’.Two events loom large over Calvey’s past: the death of her first husband, Mickey Calvey, in 1978, and the murder of her then partner Ron Cook in 1990. The first tipped her into a life of crime, the second made her one of the UK’s longest serving female prisoners..Mickey Calvey was shot in the back by a policeman during a botched robbery on 9 December, 1978. After a period of grief, his widow found herself behind the wheel as a getaway driver. Soon after that she was the one wielding a shotgun..Looking back she can scarcely believe how it escalated so quickly. ‘I think I lost my brains a bit,’ she says. ‘I look back now and think how did I go out and do robberies? It’s really alien looking back now. I’m not saying it was post-traumatic stress, but there was something that happened in me that switched my brains around. I thought, right, I’m going to do that now.’ .The terror she inflicted during that time hit home when she was finally caught. Staring down the barrel of a gun wasn’t all that pleasant for her either. She was sentenced to seven years and served three. Calvey’s unreservedly repentant about that time of her life. ‘I can’t justify it at all, what I did. I would never try to justify it.’.Calvey grew up in a loving household. Her mother ran a wig stall on Roman Road Market, and her father was a blacksmith who made dockers’ hooks. It was not until she fell in love with a bank robber that she began to see a rougher side to life, and even then it wasn’t immediately obvious. .‘Maybe because I was 19 I was quite impressionable,’ she says. ‘I thought, Oh, this is wonderful. I never looked past him coming in and putting money on the table and saying, Go on, get yourself what you want, get the kids what you want.’.Calvey was on the fringes of a bygone world, a world of armed robberies, protection rackets, and dumped bodies. It almost sounds cartoonish to Calvey as she remembers tricks of the trade – fake bus stops for would-be robbers to loiter by, fake workmen’s huts to store gear in..And it had its glamorous side, the nightclubs and prestige and wealth. That’s what Calvey experienced to begin with. Working at her mother’s stall on Roman Road Market was more than work, it was a chance to flaunt status..‘I