Bringing Down the Krays Read online

  They were pretty wild, the times at the Barn. There was one punter (whose face Ronnie later sliced open with a sword when he had failed to pay) who traded a gambling debt for a lease for Ronnie on a flat in Kensington. It was in Ashburn Gardens. It all seemed a long way from Bethnal Green. Ronnie set up there with his boyfriend, a face called Bobby Buckley.

  But it wasn’t long before Ronnie moved back to his mum’s house. Then Reggie came out of prison once more and the twins started arguing again. Ronnie put a caravan at the back of Vallance Road on some old bomb-site. It was like a garden shed, somewhere to go and sulk when they’d had a row.

  Meanwhile their business empire continued to grow. As well as running the gambling club, Leslie Payne’s main job was to supervise the Krays’ latest venture, an old fraud called ‘a long firm’. Leslie was the brains behind it. One day Alfie was taken to the front room in Vallance Road to meet him.

  Leslie looked the part, immaculately dressed and presented. He could have fronted anything. He was a smart, blond man of about thirty, with the good looks of an actor. He lived in south London, Tulse Hill, and had a family. He was going to teach Alfie everything he knew. And it turned out he was a master of his craft.

  It was a simple scam, really. There was a front man who would set up a business. He’d find premises, a warehouse, and he would get stationery printed, set up lines of credit and a bank account and then begin to trade.

  Alfie was one of the front men. He’d ring up a wholesaler and say: ‘I’ll have whatever it is in three colours, blue, green and white, and more in medium than large as that will sell more.’ The man at the other end would rub his hands in anticipation of the big deal, not knowing he was never going to see a penny profit from any of it. Thirty days’ credit was the usual.

  At first the transactions would be for relatively small amounts, with the front man building up trust with the wholesaler. When the time was right the operation would place larger orders with the suppliers. The stuff would then be sold off in a matter of hours for cash at any price, because everything must go. A huge sum might be cleared in just one day. The warehouse would be abandoned and everyone would vanish.

  At the end, when the whole lot went missing, Alfie would have to front it out and say he’d spent it all. He’d say he was a drunkard and a loser and he’d pay it back when he could. There was nothing the supplier could do.

  There was another kind of scam, according to Alfie. Whenever the twins found themselves short of money, Ronnie would say: ‘Let’s get everyone over and declare a charity.’

  Ronnie would then have a big party, getting all the rich people he knew to donate large amounts of money, which was supposedly for children or old people or some other worthy cause. But in reality it he’d siphon off a thousand or so of it straight into his pocket.

  Big-hearted Ronnie liked to cultivate a reputation for sudden, spontaneous acts of charity – having first ensured the photographers would be there, of course. What my brothers were beginning to realise, if they hadn’t done so already, was his equal capability for sudden acts of extreme violence. They were being drawn in. They weren’t yet part of the Firm themselves, but were getting close to being so.

  CHAPTER 4

  A CASUAL VIOLENCE

  GRADUALLY, MY BROTHERS were being lured deeper and deeper into the Krays’ twisted world. David told me stories about how Ronnie would arrive at the 66, walk through the door and hand him and Alfie a couple of guns – ‘a Beretta or a Luger’. He’d have to look after them for him, hiding them in the oven, the fridge, or anywhere else he could think of.

  It was a big thrill at first, according to Alfie. My brothers didn’t know much about guns, although pretty soon they would learn. It was just a way of luring them in, into the Firm, although they never considered themselves a real part of it. It just seemed so cool to be strutting around with an automatic tucked into the waistband of a smart suit.

  David admitted to me that he would often be tooled up if they went in a club, carrying guns for the Colonel in case he needed one. ‘We just sit there having a drink, while the Colonel does the business,’ he would tell me. ‘It’s only happened to me once when he actually asked me for it.’ David told me Ron had got up from his table and as he passed him on the way to the gents, he had nodded to David to follow him. ‘Giss that,’ he had said, taking the gun from my brother – but he never used it. Not on that occasion, at least.

  At the time I thought this kind of talk was fantastic. Any young man would, I suppose. I’d had been to sea and thought I was pretty tough, but this was like something out of the movies. I wanted to be part of it. David told me more: how Ronnie would tell them to go down to some club and cause havoc. ‘Smash it up, start a fight, get drunk,’ he’d order my brothers. Ronnie and Reggie would then come into the club they’d just trashed and say to the owners, ‘We can deal with all that. You give us a little pension, we’ll sort all that out. You won’t have any more trouble…’

  One day Ronnie told my brothers: ‘Listen, you two! Go back down the West End and do anything you like. If you want to take clubs over, do it, if you want to take over all the porno stuff there, do it. If you want to take over all the after-hours drinking clubs, do that too. And if anyone tries to stop you, or threatens you, just come back to us in Vallance Road and it gives us an excuse to go and get them.’

  It was exhilarating, exciting, head-turning stuff. My brothers relished telling me these stories and in turn I lapped it up. But some of their stories chilled me to the bone.

  One night David was having a drink with Ron in a club when a rich fence they knew had a few too many and started laughing to himself about how he had kept a lock-up garage round the corner for years, which the police believed belonged to Ronnie.

  Ronnie turned round to the man and, still smiling at him, said: ‘Ten years you’ve had it? And the police thought it was mine? I reckon that’s £10,000 you owe me.’

  There was an uncomfortable silence while the man searched for the right response. Ronnie just stared at him, waiting, still smiling. Then right in front of David, Ronnie took out a gun and shot the man straight in the foot. As his victim started to scream in agony, Ronnie stood over him, laughing, as if it was nothing. David and the other men present backed away, shaken.

  Minutes later the same man appeared, limping, beside David, who was now over at the bar trying to steady his nerves. ‘Get us a drink?’ he asked. Ronnie followed, calmly telling one of the Firm: ‘Set him down on that chair over there. Give him a light ale and a whisky and then take him in the car and drop him outside the hospital to get fixed up.’

  As the man left the club, Ronnie called after him, ‘And don’t forget my ten grand, will you?’

  As well as taking over the 66 Club as a sort of neutral territory, Ronnie would frequently use David’s car because he thought all the others he had access to were being watched. David became his driver a lot of the time, taking him anywhere he wanted to go. Ron loved having my good-looking younger brother driving him all over the place.

  If Ronnie wanted something, he had to have it. David would get to know about that little aspect of Ronnie’s personality, because unfortunately Ron wanted him. But it wasn’t just people. It was anything. If there was a club he fancied it would just be: ‘Oh look, this club would do us,’ and that would be it. He never mentioned money. One of the Krays’ clubs, the Green Dragon in Stepney, had been taken over like that. Soon they were in there all the time.

  David was in the 66 one night, when Big Pat Connolly – a member of the Firm who was effectively next in command after Ronnie and Reggie – came in and said he was wanted at the Green Dragon. So off David went to Brick Lane.

  It was a private club, which meant you had to sign members in to keep your alcohol licence and stay legal. When David got there, Ronnie was sitting at a table, with his older brother, Charlie Kray, and some of the Firm. David didn’t know it but Reggie was away again, in prison. They all sat down and had a drink. Ronnie asked Dav
id, ‘What do you think, David? Lovely club, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes Ronnie, it’s lovely.’

  With that, three drunks came stumbling in, signing their names at the door. Whatever they’d written, the girl at the desk wasn’t having it. She came over to Ronnie and read him what they’d put in the visitor’s book. The three of them had written ‘Dickie Bird’ as their names, and their addresses as ‘Up a tree.’

  Ron said, ‘Oh, right.’ He went up to them and had a word.

  ‘You’re not Dickie Birds, are you?’

  ‘What do you mean, mate? Who are you?’ one answered back.

  ‘And you don’t live up a tree, do you?’ Ronnie continued, ignoring him. ‘Sign your names in properly next time.’ And with that – wallop! Ronnie took a swing, and like a cartoon, the three drunks fell over, one by one, into a heap on the floor.

  Ronnie just sighed and, walking up to the bar while dusting his hands down, said ‘Giss a drink, will you?’ to the stunned barman.

  That was David’s first real introduction to the casual nature of Ronnie’s violence. Nobody moved to stop him, nobody said it was wrong. He behaved like it was nothing to knock three men out stone cold. It was just another day at the office. David was beginning to get it. This was just how Ronnie was all of the time. Did it give life that extra edge? Or were he and Alfie going somewhere they really didn’t want to go?

  It carried on from there. That was the way Ronnie did things. If you were out of order in any way you knew what to expect. You had to be respectable, and respectful. There was only one rule, and that was that you did exactly as Ronnie said. And that was whatever happened to come into his head.

  Another time, David told me, he was in Esmeralda’s at closing time when Ronnie asked him to drop him and Mad Teddy Smith off at the Regency Club – a Kray favourite in Stoke Newington – which five years later would become infamous as the starting point of the Jack the Hat murder.

  Smithy got in the back, Ron in the front. Coming along Shaftesbury Avenue, David noticed a police car was following them, and pointed it out to Ron.

  Teddy said, ‘I’ve got a tool on me, Ron.’

  Ronnie answered, ‘So have I.’

  David couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He gaped at his passengers.

  ‘Just drive careful. Don’t look round,’ Ronnie said. His voice was calm.

  David started to panic. ‘Look, Ron, I can see them in the mirror, the Old Bill. They’re going to pull us,’ he said.

  Ron said, ‘If they stop us, I’m going to kill them.’ He wasn’t so calm now.

  Terrified, David begged him, ‘Please, please don’t do that!’ He was shouting.

  Ron just kept repeating, ‘No, I am… I really mean it.’

  And he did. In that moment David saw himself being caught up in the middle of a police killing. They hanged you for that in those days. Drenched in sweat, his mind racing, David turned sharply off the main road to try to lose them. Eventually he managed to duck in and out of a few side-turnings and got rid of them.

  Arriving at the Regency, to David’s great relief, Ron told him: ‘You know, I would have shot the fucking lot of them.’

  David could only reply, ‘Ron, you know you’re not all the ticket! I’m off.’

  As he left, Ron said, as if nothing had happened: ‘Be round the house in the morning.’

  And of course David was. That’s how Ron worked. You had to do what you were told or else something very unpleasant would occur. Everyone knew it.

  By now Ronnie was using the 66 Club like it was his front room. All the rules had changed to Ronnie’s rules. There was a big cellar at the back, where David used to put all the beer. It was like a big strong-room, or a cell. Once you were in there you couldn’t get out. All concrete, no windows. If anyone was out of order, Ronnie would put them in there and leave them there, often all night. Sometimes people ended up being kept down there for days. That was just a playful slap.

  David would tell me about more extreme punishments too. There was a certain face who owed Ronnie some money. Ronnie had the hump with him. So he got some thugs to take this man on to the flat roof of the club and dangle him by the legs off the back of it. They held him off the side by his feet while Ronnie said: ‘Now you know what’s coming to you next time.’ Then they put him down the cell.

  But it could go either way in the twins’ company. It could be terrifying one moment and hilarious the next. David once brought a very good-looking friend of his called Johnny into the 66 one evening. Ronnie noticed him immediately. ‘Who’s he?’ he asked, the moment he walked in. Following a brief introduction David took Johnny up to the bar for a drink.

  Suddenly Johnny started nudging David, and whispering in a panic-stricken voice: ‘That man over there – he keeps looking at my arse. He’s a back-passage merchant. I’ve got to get out of here.’ By the time Ronnie started asking for him, Johnny was already in a taxi on his way home. He didn’t know what a lucky escape he’d had.

  This wasn’t the only time David’s friends had a close brush with Ronnie. One night the Krays were doing some business upstairs when three or four old school-friends of his turned up at the door of the 66. Knowing Ron wouldn’t want them in that night, David tried to tell them to leave. As they were talking, Ron appeared at the top of the stairs to ask him what was going on. When David told them it was his friends and he was trying to get rid of them, Ron’s mood suddenly went sour, and he snarled, ‘Go on, open the door – I’m going to do them!’

  Terrified that Ron would be as good as his word, David slammed the door shut in their faces. The following day David ran into his friends again near Cambridge Circus. They started to have a go at him, saying, ‘That’s a nice way to treat your old friends, to slam the door in our faces!’ David told them the Krays had been there and asked them if they’d ever heard the name before. His friends said they hadn’t. David told them that they were lucky to be alive. It was true.

  Ronnie’s capacity for violence, as the whole world would hear one day, was unusual to say the least. Years before, in prison on assault charges, he had been transferred from Winchester Jail to a mental hospital. Here the doctors decided he had suffered a schizophrenic breakdown, which powerful drugs might be able to treat.

  The doctors missed the paranoid bit. Ronnie absconded with Reggie’s help and managed to hide in a caravan on a farm in Suffolk owned by an insurance fraudster called Geoff Allen (whose house I would later visit). Mad Teddy Smith fetched and carried for him. It couldn’t last long. After a few weeks he went back to prison and after a few months more, Ronnie was ‘returned to society’. That was back in 1959. But his instability was always smouldering just beneath the surface.

  In 1961 Reggie found himself arrested again, for housebreaking this time. But the woman who had filed the charges failed to identify him in court and the case was dismissed. They had a big party. There was always a party. Then a few weeks later they were charged with ‘loitering with intent to steal’ – by trying the doors of cars somewhere in Hackney. As if they’d do that. Again they got off, claiming police harassment. There was another big party that night, 8 May 1961, at Esmeralda’s Barn.

  Ronnie proposed a toast to ‘British Justice’ and all the journalists and photographers were given champagne. The Krays for the first time were national news. The papers the next day carried a big article about ‘the celebrated boxing twins’, which was what they were famous for at first – they had once had some success as boxers before their criminal record and dishonourable discharge from the army brought an end to their careers. The papers proudly proclaimed their declaration to ‘go straight’.

  And this time it seemed Reggie really seemed to want to go straight. He spent much of the summer at a place called Steeple Bay, on the Thames estuary in Essex, where the family had a caravan. I’d get to know about it one day. There was girl called Frances Shea from Hackney who came down for weekends. Alfie knew her brother, Frankie Shea. She was sixteen and Reggie was twenty-s
even. She seemed to offer Reggie the opportunity to make a different life.

  But it was clear to Alfie that Ronnie, who disliked all women except his mother, saw Frances as a threat. She would tell his brother what time to come home in the evening – just like Charlie’s wife, Dolly, did – much to Ronnie’s disgust. The way he saw it, that’s what all women did.

  The next summer, 1962, the twins opened their latest club. It was called the Kentucky, and it was located in Stepney, just across from the ABC Empire cinema at 106a Bow Road. It was supposed to be a posher version of the Double R, which had shut down when its drinks licence renewal was refused. The East End was suddenly getting a bit trendy. But to prove it you had to get faces in – proper faces, not just some old boxers like the Krays were always being photographed with. They wanted pop singers, film stars, people their old mum had seen off the telly.

  They employed their old army chum, Dickie Morgan, to cruise the West End to persuade celebrity customers to head east. From what Alfie told me, Dickie was dreadful at it. My brothers were meant to do the same, to get faces in. David managed to get Colin Hicks (Tommy Steele’s brother) and two tap dancers from America called the Clark Brothers. They used to sing as well, but Ronnie never gave them any money. Once they complained about the lack of pay and Ronnie said: ‘Here, give them a fiver for their cab fare home.’

  But the club did come good one time. The premiere of the film Sparrers Can’t Sing was held at the Empire in Bow Road, on 27 February 1963. The whole Firm was told to attend, including their wives. Alfie and David were there too, of course. Princess Margaret was meant to be present, but Lord Snowdon turned up without her. People were told she had flu. Maybe her bodyguards wouldn’t let her go down the East End.