At just 16 he was Britain’s youngest armed robber.
He went on to lead a firm of hitmen, blaggers and racketeers, dealing out extreme violence and brandishing a shotgun he called Kennedy.
Bobby Cummines built a brutal reputation in 1970s North London and when, inevitably, he ended up in jail , he caused constant chaos, even holding the governor of a maximum security prison as a hostage.
But it was a conversation behind bars with one of Britain’s best-known criminals that put Bobby on the road to redemption.
He got to know the late Charlie Richardson of the notorious South London “Torture Gang”, a deadly rival of the Kray Twins .
“He told me I had a good brain but if I carried on I would end up dead or on a life sentence.
"He told me to get into education – that it would earn me money without hurting anyone,” says Bobby, now 62.
Incredibly, he did just that, and Bobby is now a respected anti-crime campaigner whose charities have helped rehabilitate hundreds of ex-offenders.
He has worked with judges and advised ministers.
Now he has written his autobiography too, detailing his life of crime and how he went straight. Including the moment in 2011 when the man who kept a portrait of the Queen in his cell met her in person to get an OBE.
“The Queen told me I had a really colourful background and she was pleased to award me the OBE.
"That’s the nicest way I can think of someone telling me I’ve got a lot of form,” says Bobby.
"“I’ve done some horrendous things – extreme violence – I never deny that. I deserved every day I got in prison because it was lunacy.
“I was dangerous and if I hadn’t been stopped there would have been shootings.
"There would have been dead bodies all over the place. But I got to the stage where I didn’t want to hurt people any more.
“When I got my OBE I was humbled.
"I never expected that. I was just trying to make up for all the bad things I’d done and make sure other kids didn’t do the same.”
Growing up in a law-abiding family in King’s Cross, Bobby left school at 16 with no qualifications.
Landing a good job as a shipping clerk, he looked set for a career in customs and excise until, he says, two bent cops “fitted me up” for possession of a cut-throat razor.
“I’ll admit to everything I’ve done in my life, but not that,” says Bobby.
“My dad was old school. He believed all coppers were like Dixon of Dock Green. He thought I must have done it if they said I did.”
For the sake of his sobbing parents Bobby pleaded guilty and took a fine, but when his bosses heard about it he lost his job.
Angry and unemployable, he turned to crime for real and within a year, still just 16, he was jailed for armed robbery.
It was there that he met the Kray twins and completed his criminal education.
“As soon as you went through the door they beat you up,” he says.
“That taught me violence has a voice. When I came out I was a super-fit thug. I thought, if you want a war I’ll give you one.”
At the peak of his criminal career 40 years ago Bobby had developed a routine for extracting loyalty, slapping a pound note and a bullet on the table.
The message was clear. Play your part and the pounds roll in – cross the boss and the bullet ends up in the back of your head.
Outsiders who interfered in his business got the “eternal triangle of violence” – education, intimidation and elimination.
“First you educate them by laying down the rules,” says Bobby.
“If they don’t obey them the next step is to intimidate them – usually a ride in the back of the van and a damn good beating.
"If they carry on doing it – you eliminate them.”
For example, he says two Turkish brothers had begun pushing drugs to the daughter of a couple who ran his local chippie so they could pimp her out as a prostitute.
Bobby, who ran a string of protection rackets, got out his shotgun (named Kennedy after the assassinated US president) and loaded it with hard rock salt that would melt into the wounds.
He turned up at the brother’s garage early next morning.
He recalls: “One of them was working under a car. I walked straight through the door and aimed at his legs.
"He writhed in agony and I left him to scream. He probably thought he had been peppered with real pellets.
“But I can’t say I got any enjoyment from what I was doing. It was just work.
"You become desensitised to violence. It doesn’t matter if I like you or hate you.
"If I was paid money to shoot you in the leg, that’s what I’m going to do to you.”
Once a local thug told people Bobby was behind a spate of stabbings and shootings and described him as a gangster.
“I pushed him up against the wall,” says Bobby.
“His whole body quivered as I stuck the barrel of the revolver into his big mouth. I told him I wasn’t a gangster – I was a businessman trying to earn a crust.
"Then I took the barrel out of his mouth and smashed him in the face with the butt.”
To Bobby it was business. So much so that his autobiography is called I Am Not A Gangster.
In 1978 while on the run before serving his last and longest jail sentence, he was determined to see his father as he lay dying from brain cancer in hospital.
Bobby says: “I walked in with my brother Frankie and this little nurse said, ‘The police showed us a photo of you. We’re supposed to pick the phone up if you come in’.
“I opened my coat, showed her my revolver and said, ‘If you do that you’re going to have your A&E full of a load of shot coppers’.
“Instead she asked us to put on hospital gowns so we looked like patients and that’s what we did.
"We sat with my dad for three days.”
Bobby is quick to dismiss any romantic notions about living a life of crime.
“I really get the hump with Guy Ritchie making the crime business look glamorous in his films,” he says.
“It’s a joke. That world is hell. You’re totally paranoid, scared of getting whacked. I got shot at three times.
"They got me once in the leg and I was stabbed in the belly.
“Other men slept with their dreams. I slept with a gun under my pillow.
"I used to lie in bed wondering if a petrol bomb would come through the window. I thought I’d be dead by 30.”
There is remorse in his steely blue eyes as he says he is haunted by the death of one victim during a wages robbery that went wrong.
“We tied the gag too tight and one person choked on their own vomit,” he says.
“I have to live with that. I wish it never happened.”
He stood trial for murder but was found not guilty and went down for manslaughter instead.
“The jury could see it was an accident,” he says in his book.
While Bobby was in Parkhurst prison for the final time in 1978 he was called on to negotiate a truce between Reggie Kray and Charlie Richardson to stop a civil war in the cells.
He forged a close friendship with the Richardson.
“With Reggie it was all about thuggery,” says Bobby. “But I’d never met a more intelligent man than Charlie.”
Taking his new friend’s advice, Bobby began to study for an Open University degree in sociology and psychology.
And when he was released in 1987, aged 35, he took a £100-a -week job stacking shelves.
Later he began working for the offenders charity Unlock and he now runs his own charity MIDAS, going into schools and colleges teaching kids the reality of crime and gangs.
His message is “mugs take drugs and fools carry tools”.
With the National Crime Agency estimating there are now 37,000 villains linked to more than 5,000 gangs in Britain, Bobby says he has yet to find a politician with the guts to tackle the causes of crime.
“The kids on the street call the House of Commons the House of Conmen,” he says.
“They tell me, ‘The politicians have got their hands in the till, why shouldn’t we?’ So I’m still fighting.”
Bobby is now happily married to Japanese charity worker Ami and thinks of her son Kai as his own.
He has a daughter Sophie, 23, from his first marriage, which broke down after his second daughter Abigail was stillborn.
He says: “That was the worst pain. It proved I wasn’t invincible. But I love my kids and my life now.
"It’s a beautiful world and I’m skint but I’m happy. I’ve got more wealth in me than Bill Gates will ever have.
“I just wish my parents could see me now. They would have been so proud.”
I Am Not A Gangster by Bobby Cummines is published by Ebury Press. RRP £14.99.
