Still up to no good: Former gangland enforcer 'Mad' Frankie Fraser hit with care home ASBO

'Mad Frankie' earned his nickname after pretending to be mentally ill (Getty Images)

He was the gangland enforcer whose name, uttered aloud, was enough to strike fear into the heart of London's most hardened criminals.

And now in a sign that time has not withered “Mad” Frankie Fraser's ability to cause trouble, the 89-year-old has been hit with a care home anti-social behaviour order (ASBO).

Fraser, who spent 42 years behind bars for 26 offences until 1989 and stole his first packet of cigarettes at 13, was issued the ASBO following an incident in his residential accommodation, according to one of his sons.

Fraser's son David told a new documentary on the criminal that his father got in an argument with a fellow resident and centred on his unrepentant attitude to his life of crime at the London home and was subsequently issued with the ASBO.

Fraser is one of the last living “celebrity criminals” and was arguably the most feared person in the London criminal underworld of the 1960s that also featured the Kray twins and Richardson gang.

He earned the nickname “Mad Frankie” after he pretended to be mentally ill to avoid the World War II call-up and was classified as insane three times during his prison stints.

He was most famously jailed for 10 years in the “torture trial” of 1967 for “punishing” those who owed money or had angered his paymasters, Charlie and Eddie Richardson.

During the trial he was accused of pulling out his victims' teeth with pliers. In the documentary, Fraser's decision to join the Richardsons instead of the rival Krays was described as “like China getting the atom bomb”.

He emerged from jail in 1989 and has not been back since. “Maybe he was bored with going to prison,” Ronnie Richardson, Charlie's widow, told the programme.

In 1991, while emerging from Turnmills nightclub in Clerkenwell, London, he was shot at by an unidentified gunman. According to David Fraser his father was unharmed but he did not inform on his assailant. “If you play by the sword, you've got to expect the sword as well,” he said.

Frankie Fraser's Last Stand is broadcast on the Crime and Investigation Network on 16 June at 9pm