Prisons
Alan has served three prison sentences. Two sentences were spent in the UK and one was spent in North Africa and across prisons on the mainland of Spain. In total Alan has been in prison for just under a decade of his life and has been sent to the following 16 prisons.
Cardiff Prison
Latchmere House Borstal
Hollesley Bay Borstal
Bristol Prison
HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs (aka The scrubs)
Shepton Mallet Prison
Ceuta Prison (Los Rosales)
Algeciras Prison
Puerto Santa Maria Prison
Cordoba Prison
Ceville Prison
Carabanchel Prison
Burgos Prison
Herez Prison
Cadiz Prison
El Dueso Prison (nr Santander)
Carabanchel Prison Mental Hospital
Alan was sentenced to his first crime at the age of 16. He was caught burgling petty cash and alcohol from Solicitors offices in Pontypridd. At the Cardiff courts of quarter sessions Alan was sentenced to Borstal for a minimum of 9 months to a maximum of 3 years depending on behaviour.
Only aged 16 he was sent to Cardiff prison which housed adult prisoners until they could find a suitable Borstal. At the prison he met several gangsters and also the infamous serial killer and paedophile John Straffen. He also was educated on how to start a prison riot.
After several months he was later sent to the resettlement prison Latchmere house in Richmond, Surrey. It was a youth prison where delinquent young people were sent in order to be assessed so they could be sent to the appropriate Borstal. At Latchmere they were very strict and disciplined boys adopting military style regimes, rather like a boot camp.
After a few months he was then sent to Hollesley Bay Borstal in Woodbridge, Suffolk to serve out the rest of his sentence. At Hollesley Bay he befriended Edwin Bush who later went on to commit murder and be hanged for his crime.
Alan's second sentence was in February 1973. He was sent down for four years for stealing two cars and a safe from Lockyer and Peacy garage in Ferndale. The police originally thought the heist was carried about by London or Cardiff gangs. Their suspicions so strong they even closed lanes of the M4 motorway directly after the raid. Little did they realise the criminals were Alan and his associates who lived only a few miles away. However due to a friends error of judgement he was caught.
In the first year of his sentence he was sent to Bristol prison. The prisoners in the neighbouring cells to Alan were that of Mad Frankie Frazier and Patrick Joseph Hill, one of the Birmingham six. Also on the same landing were Alan's future partners in smuggling cannabis.
Alan was then sent to Shepton Mallet prison, then to Wormwood Scrubs and then back to Shepton Mallet.
On July 11th 1978 Alan was caught in Ceuta, Morocco carrying 60lbs of hashish and sent to Los Rosales prison. Although he had spent a few years in prison in the UK nothing could have prepared him for this North African prison. The conditions were revolting. In his room he was supplied with a mattress stinking of urine, a sink with no running water and a toilet that didn't work. In the kitchens where the food was prepared was infested with flies, cockroaches and rats. The prison guards were lazy and did very little employing trusted prisoners with keys to parts of the prisons. On the nightshifts the prison guards would get drunk and play cards. Alan was also shocked at how the prisoners could openly get drunk and take drugs as long as they did not cause a fuss to the guards.
After only a few months Alan made two failed escape attempts as he could not bear the filthy conditions. The first attempted escape he did was alone and involved creating a self made bomb. On the second escape attempt Alan inspired ten other European prisoners to join him but again he was unsuccessful and all involved were caught be the guards. For inciting others and being a leader of the escape Alan was punished by being beaten to the brink of death and then put in solitary confinement for two weeks. Once out of solitary he and 9 of the men on the escape were sent to a more secure prison in mainland Spain as they were now deemed dangerous. Due to there dangerous status he was continually shipped around from prison to prison and sent on the ghost train. In all Alan went to ten different prisons across Spain and North Africa.
The most harrowing prison he was sent to was Carabanchel, Madrid. He was sent to the mental hospital there and was given the unusual prison job of being a psychiatric nurse to its patients. The hospital housed prisoners with a variety of serious mental illnesses; the large majority being sociopaths serving lengthy sentences for repeated rapes and or murders, including the infamous Spanish serial killer Manuel Delgado Villegas. Although a prisoner, he and other European inmates were allowed to work as untrained nurses, even being allowed to administer injections and lock patients in their cells.
