The last time he was let out of jail, Charles Bronson robbed a jeweller’s and fought a rottweiler. Will this time be different for the inmate now known as Salvador?
The prisoner formerly known as Bronson wants the world to know he has changed. “I’ve done some mad things, I’ve been a nasty bastard,” he says from his maximum security cell in one of the many prisons where he has been incarcerated since being jailed in 1974 for armed robbery (with only a brief spell of freedom in the late 1980s). “I have found my true self through my art. I’ve swapped the sawn-off shotgun for the sawn-off paintbrush.”
These days he calls himself Charles Salvador. He even has a Dalí moustache. Auctioneers of his pictures of prison and psychiatric hospital life call him an outsider artist. Nonsense. He’s an insider, though that may change.
