Why do people lionise Brown Bread Fred, the Kray crony who murdered their enemies with such relish?

For the best part of 50 years, Freddie Foreman rode shotgun on the coat-tails of London's lowlife. 

A teenage petty thief and thug, he rose by degrees – and by the extreme violence he was prepared to administer – into a notorious armed robber and vicious gangland enforcer.

A man who at one of his Old Bailey trials – he earned spurious criminal celebrity having been acquitted of murder a record four times – was said to have ripped out the heart of one of his victims after he and an associate shot him dead at point blank range.

Yet when his death, aged 94, in a care home was announced at the weekend, this former hitman for the Kray Twins was saluted by many on social media as no more than a lovable rogue. 

'A sound geezer,' wrote one admirer; 'Legend,' said another: 'Old school … a gentleman … they don't make them like this no more'.

A Facebook page was full of similar misguided eulogies. '[If] Foreman etc were still running the underworld the civilian world for women and kids would be a lot safer…' 

This, of course, was the cuddly image Foreman liked to play up to: a villain, yes, but one admired as well as feared, firm but fair.

When in the 1990s he published his memoirs Respect – The Managing Director of British Crime, he was feted with a launch party at the Cafe Royal – Oscar Wilde's old haunt on London's Piccadilly – surrounded by a cavalcade of smiling minor celebrities, including the late EastEnders star Barbara Windsor.

It was not quite as glittering as the days when Ronnie and Reggie Kray played host to Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Hollywood hardman George Raft – and, of course, Windsor herself – but impressive nonetheless.

Despite his reputation for brutality and a hefty prison record – he spent 16 years in 15 different jails – he presented himself on television chat shows as a reformed gangster denouncing the false allure that clung to Swinging Sixties mobsters – while at the same time apparently celebrating it.

'There's no glamour in being locked up,' he declaimed. But the real crime seemed to lie in getting caught, for he remained in touch with the Krays while they were in prison and was a pallbearer at Ronnie's funeral in 1995.

He was known as 'Brown Bread' Fred: Cockney rhyming slang for 'dead', and a reference to the body count for which he claimed responsibility. 

Chief among these were two notorious 1960s killings, the murder of Frank 'Mad Axeman' Mitchell and a few months later that of Jack 'the Hat' McVitie.

Mitchell, a psychotic hooligan, had been sprung from Dartmoor prison by the Krays to boost their status in the underworld.

His daring escape led to a political storm over the negligent security around a man described by newspapers as 'Britain's most violent convict'.

But while the breakout did indeed make the Krays famous, Mitchell's volatility became a problem for the twins, and they decided to have him killed.

On Christmas Eve 1966, Foreman and an accomplice lured Mitchell into the back of a van on the pretext that they were moving him to a new safe house. 

As the door slammed, Foreman drew a silenced handgun, and the other gangster took out a revolver. The shot him 15 times, including three times to the heart and twice to the head.

At his subsequent trial the jury heard how Foreman had described to another associate cutting up the body and that Mitchell 'had a tiny brain', cupping his hands to show how small it was. 

Although acquitted – the associate's evidence was ruled inadmissible – Foreman later confessed, claiming it was revenge for the shooting of his brother.

For years after his disappearance, the Mad Axeman was believed to be encased in a concrete pillar of the M11 motorway. 

But in his autobiography, Foreman said he had trussed the body in chicken wire, weighted it and dumped it in the Channel.

The book also solved the mystery of what happened to Ginger Marks, a used car dealer shot outside a Bethnal Green nightclub owned by the Krays in 1965. 

His body too was never found, and the killing remained unsolved until an informant named Foreman. 

The lack of positive identification prevented a guilty verdict, though Foreman admitted the shooting in his memoir.

By the time of his acquittal in 1975, 'Brown Bread' Fred was already serving a ten-year sentence for being an accessory to the murder of McVitie, who had been savagely stabbed to death by Reggie Kray at a party in Stoke Newington in 1967.

The Krays had paid McVitie to kill Leslie 'the Brain' Payne, a former business associate who had crossed the twins.

When justice finally caught up with the Krays for the murder of McVitie and another criminal, George Cornell who had unwisely called the homosexual Ronnie a 'big fat poof', Foreman was found guilty of having disposed of McVitie's body.

While Foreman relished his years as a figure in the cult that surrounded the Krays' 'firm', he disavowed the 'godfather' status given by the media and preferred to be known simply as 'one of the chaps'.

He always denied rumours that he took part in the Great Train Robbery of 1963 – and would surely have boasted of it, were it true – but did claim he had been sounded out as a potential participant. 

Whatever the truth – and he was never arrested in connection with the so-called crime of the century – he claimed to have organised robber Ronnie Biggs's spectacular escape from Wandsworth prison two years later.

Foreman was born in Battersea, south London in 1932, the youngest of five brothers. His Irish father had fought on the Somme in the First World War but later served prison sentences for assault and battery. His middle-class mother was, ironically, a sister of Durham's chief constable.

He grew up watching bare-knuckle fights and was sent to a gym in Soho to learn to box. 

On leaving school at 14 he had a string of manual jobs and was soon involved in petty crime as a 'spiv' trading stolen goods on the black market. 

When his mother, on whom he doted (a prerequisite for gangsters), found a gun in his bedroom, she is said to have remarked: 'Fred Foreman, you're going to end up hanging from a noose.'

By the early 1950s he was running his own gang, whose members included Great Train Robbers Buster Edwards and Tommy Wisbey. 

He also worked with an all-women shoplifting gang known as the Forty Thieves, who targeted West End stores such as Harrods stealing furs and stuffing their underwear with jewellery.

The proceeds of crime, which by now included robbing post offices, were invested into 'legit' businesses that dealt in cash: a gym, a pub and betting shops. 

It was while on the run from one robbery that he met the Krays who gave him the use of a flat behind the Blind Beggar pub in Stepney.

After serving six years of his sentence for disposing of McVitie, he bought into a pool hall business that earned him £3,000 a week. 

He was not straight for long. After a customs officer was killed during a botched raid in which he had a peripheral role, Foreman fled to the US.

He was lured back by an invitation to be involved in what would be Britain's biggest ever cash robbery – on the headquarters of Security Express in London in 1983. 

Foreman was one of six armed and masked men who escaped with £7 million. During the raid a guard was blindfolded, doused with petrol and threatened with being burned alive.

Later Foreman, who went to ground in Spain, a bolthole for British criminals, boasted: 'We gave the guards tea, and no one went to hospital and I am proud of that.' 

But after six years he was arrested and extradited to Britain still in his shorts and flip-flops and jailed for nine years for handling stolen money.

Did crime pay for Brown Bread? Certainly, he educated his two sons in fee-paying schools. 

But he was separated from his wife Maureen at the time of her death in 2015 and was reported to be penniless and estranged from his family three years later. 

His final days were spent in a Maida Vale nursing home – where he kept a framed photograph of the Krays on his bedside table.