Bringing Down the Krays Read online

  Ronnie loved blue films. David told me about a party one night at Ron’s flat. Everyone was watching them and getting very drunk. The film kept breaking and everyone started booing. It was funny really.

  There were a lot of girls around too. Reggie used to say to Alfie: ‘Go and get some women.’ Alfie was a real ladies’ man; he was the one bringing the birds back. But Ronnie would be saying: ‘No, go and get some boys.’ So half the time poor Alfie didn’t know where he was.

  One of the girls was very pretty, but looked very much like a boy, slim-hipped and short-haired. Ronnie took to her immediately, whispering in her ear, and leading her to the bedroom. Suddenly Alfie and David heard the girl crying out, not in ecstasy, but in distress. David walked over to the door and called out to her, asking her if everything was all right. Ron was furious, telling him to ‘Fuck off out of it.’ But David guessed what was happening – that he was forcing her to have anal sex.

  Ten minutes later the girl came out of the room, screaming that she wanted to go home, that Ronnie was ‘mental’ and she didn’t want anything to do with him ever again.

  Ronnie did what he liked. There were so many incidents that should have alerted my brothers. Not only was he going more and more insane, but he was also getting increasingly sexually voracious, if that were possible. They were always being sent out to find him boys.

  Ron was after David too, right from the beginning. He was always touching him but David wasn’t frightened of him then and would just tell him to leave him alone. He kept him at bay by getting him rent boys instead.

  It all nearly came out in public. The Cedra Court scene with all those celebrities and politicians trooping through Ronnie’s flat was far too wild to keep hidden. On 12 July 1964 the famous newspaper headline appeared in the Sunday Mirror: ‘Peer and a Gangster: Yard Inquiry’. The story went that a senior Scotland Yard detective was investigating connections between an ‘underworld thug and a well-known member of the House of Lords’. A week later there was another front-page headline when the Mirror ran a story entitled ‘The Picture We Dare Not Print’. It was a stunt really – a story about a photograph of the peer and the gangster sitting on a bed with a ‘beatnik youth’. Well, it’s true, they dared not print it.

  The photo was of Ronnie and Lord Boothby. Lord Boothby was the Conservative peer who appeared frequently on the telly and in the newspapers. That’s what the foreign magazines said at the time, even though you couldn’t say that here in Britain. The boy on the bed was Leslie Holt from Cedra Court, rent-boy and cat-burglar. But it didn’t come out until years later that the Prime Minster and Home Secretary had been involved in the cover-up, and that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had terminated the investigation. The government were really frightened, worried that Ronnie was trying to get his picture taken with Sir Winston Churchill. So Boothby got a heavy solicitor and the Mirror ended up paying him £40,000, an enormous sum of money in those days. It didn’t even go to court. But it was all true, what the paper had said. Boothby told people that he’d used the libel money to buy a house in France. In fact he gave much of it to Ronnie.

  There was also a Labour MP on the scene at the time, named Tom Driberg. He was another homosexual. He loved the set-up at Ronnie’s and was always round Cedra Court. It was Mad Teddy who introduced the Krays to Driberg because Teddy was sleeping with him. Teddy was like a scout for the Krays, searching for people who might be useful. The Krays then met Boothby through Driberg.

  The two of them were very different personalities. As Alfie described them, Boothby was big and blustering, whereas Driberg was small and sickly-looking, like you wouldn’t want to get too close to him. Both got a real kick out of being friends with the Colonel. And of course having these powerful connections on both sides of the political spectrum was tremendously advantageous for the Krays. They were controlling the police and now they could control the Establishment too.

  David told me about one night when he and Alfie went to a party down in Brighton. It was a big house, full of MPs, including Boothby and Driberg, as well as Ronnie and Reggie. Everyone was terribly drunk. Mad Teddy Smith was there too, with Driberg, who had a gold cigarette holder and was walking around like the Queen with his drink balanced in one hand.

  My brothers discovered that Driberg used to tell Mad Teddy about the houses of rich friends he could burgle. He and Boothby would send Teddy or Leslie Holt out on housebreaking missions to turn over anyone who had crossed them.

  It was around this time that the Krays got involved in a mad scheme to fund the building of a new town in Enugu, Nigeria. Ronnie had been introduced to the project through his new political connections and Leslie Payne encouraged him to take it on. David was driving Ronnie round for meets and he heard about it all first-hand. Payne had set up an investment vehicle for this building development in the newly independent African nation. Ronnie got flown out to Nigeria, where he was treated like royalty and given VIP treatment. He thought the deal would be his ticket to greatness. It all went wrong. The project collapsed, Payne was arrested in Nigeria and had to be sprung out of prison with a big pay-off. Boothby would later claim he’d only got involved with Ronnie because he’d been approached to be an investor in the Nigerian project. It was lies, rubbish. He got involved because they were sharing boyfriends.

  Alfie knew the truth of it. He was taking round money from Boothby so Ronnie would keep quiet. Lots of money. Alfie saw it all.

  On two separate occasions he was asked by Ronnie to go and get £5,000 from Lord Boothby for him. That was his share of the Mirror money. The way he had to do it was very complicated, but Ron insisted. He had to walk from Vallance Road to Aldgate East, get a taxi down to Victoria Station, jump out of the taxi and walk round to Eaton Place, a little way from Victoria.

  He then had to go to No 1, press the bell and go in and get the money – an envelope stuffed full of cash. The first time he went, Boothby asked Alfie if he’d like a drink, but he told him: ‘No, thanks, Ronnie is expecting me back straight away.’

  On the way back he had to go through exactly the same routine, all the while making sure he wasn’t being followed – getting a taxi at Victoria to Aldgate, and then walking down to Vallance Road. Ronnie got no money from the newspaper libel case, officially anyway, but this was his share.

  After that Ronnie’s appetites just got wilder. And so did the parties. It was like he was untouchable. When Alfie was driving him round, Ronnie used to tell him to stop the car in Piccadilly and go up to some boy and get him in the back of the car. Then Ronnie would take him back and sleep on the floor with him in the kitchen of Alfie’s house in Millman Street, Holborn. Wendy and Alfie would sleep in a big double bed in one room with their two sons beside them, while Ronnie would order Wendy to make up a bed in the kitchen for him and the boy. Wendy hated it but they were too scared to refuse.

  This wasn’t the first time my brothers’ wives got dragged into Ronnie’s dark world. Just before it was shut down, Ronnie was in Esmeralda’s one night when he called David over and said he wanted to go to his place – ‘to get away from everyone’. You couldn’t say ‘no’ to Ronnie so David jumped in a cab with him and they drove over to his flat in Bloomsbury. David was living there with his wife, Christine, and by now they also had two young children.

  When they got there, Ronnie told him he wanted to spend the next three days, as he put it, ‘getting off booze and drugs’, seeing how he’d cope without his Stemetil. This was the powerful drug he had been prescribed after he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, used in the treatment of psychotic illness. He said that it was something he had to do, but insisted he had to do it with David. Never mind the fact that Christine and the kids would be there too. He told David, ‘I have to get away from the Firm.’

  Knowing Ronnie’s moods, David was terrified. But there was nothing he could do but let him stay. Christine wasn’t happy about it, of course, and neither was David. But what could he do? Was this guy his friend? Was he his bo
ss?

  The flat was just one room. Ronnie slept on the end of the bed with David’s two children in cots either side of the bed. For the first day he was perfectly well-behaved, calm and reasonable. By the second he was starting to get twitchy, becoming very easily irritated. It was clear he was struggling without his medication and by the third day he’d had enough. Looking pale and sweating heavily he told David: ‘Take me back to Vallance Road.’

  David later told me Ron seemed edgy, neurotic and constantly thirsty. He knew then his nerves had gone. Ronnie was very dependent on his pills. He had about six private doctors, all of them crooked, who he paid to give him whatever he felt he needed at the time. Paradoxically, these were the only people Ronnie ever actually paid. Everyone else, including his barrister, was always told: ‘I’ll sort it out later.’

  Dropping Ronnie off outside, David went to park the car. By the time he got back to the house, Ronnie was having to restrain Reggie from going for him. ‘I’m going to kill him,’ was all he kept saying. Ronnie had effectively disappeared for three days – and Reggie blamed David for it.

  Luckily Reggie calmed down and David got back into his good books, continuing to run errands and drive cars for both twins. Reggie was still after Frances Shea at the time. She was the sister of a good friend of Alfie’s named Frank Shea. Frankie ran a used-car business on Pentonville Road where Reggie used to take his cars. Frances was a beautiful girl – stunning, according to Alfie. She looked like the young Brigitte Bardot. But once she was with Reggie, she seemed petrified all the time.

  While Reggie was after Frances, David used to drive round and collect her for him, so he got to know her quite well. David thought she seemed quiet and bookish. She very rarely smiled, always had a long face and it was as if she was weighing you up when she looked at you. She was probably frightened to speak for fear of saying something she shouldn’t.

  Her father and mother couldn’t stand the twins. When David dropped Reggie round to see her, Reg had to wait outside for her because her father hated him so much. He wouldn’t let him into the house even after the wedding.

  Reggie used to tell David to put her in the back of the car when he was picking her up, but sometimes she’d try and sit in the front with my brother. If she did, David would get it from Reggie afterwards: ‘I’m going to fucking kill you!’ He may not have been quite as volatile as his twin but Reggie’s moods could still turn on a sixpence.

  Relations were also strained between Frances and Ronnie. Whenever they got to Cedra Court she would ask David: ‘Is that pig there?’ She meant Ronnie.

  In spite of Frances’s view of Ronnie, the twins weren’t about to say goodbye to one another. They were on a roll after the Boothby business. The police – the straight ones, that is – seemed to just give up. It seemed like nothing could touch them – not the law, the politicians, the media, anything.

  After the 66 Club got too small, the Krays found a new home for the Firm. They set up at a place called the Glenrae Hotel, a Victorian mansion in Finsbury Park. It was at 380 Seven Sisters Road, not far from Cedra Court, and had a drinking club in the basement. They’d sent in the Firm as ‘staff’. Billy Exley, an old boxer, became the Glenrae’s barman. The real owners didn’t have a chance. All the regulars cleared off. The twins were back in the club business.

  Most of all, though, they wanted to be back up the West End. There was a face called Hew McCowan who had a big flat at Marble Arch full of fruit machines. That was his business. There were non-stop parties, all-nighters, to which David and Alfie were always invited. He was already in the Krays’ sights because David had introduced him to Charlie the year before, and as a result he had been tapped by Leslie Payne for that Nigerian scheme. McCowan had a club called the Bon Soir in Gerrard Street, which he was doing up and was planning to reopen at Christmas. He was going to rename it the Hideaway.

  The Krays decided they would like twenty per cent of the profits. They summoned McCowan to the Grave Maurice pub in the Whitechapel Road to do a deal. McCowan refused. That was unwise. Now they demanded fifty per cent. The twins booked a table for ten people on the opening night of the Hideaway and of course their party failed to appear. But Mad Teddy Smith did show, two nights later, and smashed up some lamps, saying: ‘You know who my friends are.’ Well, everybody knew who his friends were. That was meant to assure cooperation.

  But instead, as David heard it, McCowan had gone round to West End Central Police Station and accused the twins of demanding money with menaces. Next thing we knew, Charlie Kray was telling David the twins had been nicked and he had to go and visit Ronnie in Brixton Prison. David didn’t want to go or to get involved at all. But he had no chance of staying out of it. He’d have been done himself if he had said no.

  It turned out that a new copper was on their case. Ronnie, Reggie and Teddy Smith had all been nicked at the Glenrae Hotel by a detective superintendent from the Yard called Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read. We’d never heard of him. They didn’t get bail and they were all on remand.

  So David, on Charlie’s instructions, went to see Ronnie in Brixton. The Colonel said to him: ‘Listen boy, I want you to do me a favour. Go round and see that cunt McCowan and tell him if he don’t drop the charges, him and his whole family will be done.’

  David was shocked. It was one thing running little errands for the Krays but to actually threaten someone himself? He said, ‘Ron, I can’t. Please don’t make me do this.’ But Ron just answered: ‘Go round and tell him!’

  So that night David went to McCowan’s. He told him the twins had given him a message for him to drop the charges or he’d be in a lot of trouble. McCowan said: ‘I’ve got the police on to it now.’ He didn’t seem to get it. Anyway he was brave – but very foolish. There was no way the police were going to win this one. No one dared back up McCowan’s accusations.

  Nipper Read went round all the other Soho club owners but they all said the same thing. There was never any trouble from the Krays. There had never been any threats – McCowan was drunk, jealous, making it all up. The twins used the Boothby money to pay fancy lawyers and employ a private investigator to dig dirt on McCowan – of which there was plenty.

  The jury was got at, too – not once but three times. All the witnesses who had initially been brave enough to speak up quickly changed their minds. Charlie was going round to Boothby’s gaff all the time to keep him onside. Boothby even asked a question in the House of Lords on the Krays’ behalf. On 6 April 1965, the jury gave their verdict, after ten minutes’ deliberation. Not guilty.

  That afternoon they all came back from the Old Bailey in triumph to Vallance Road to celebrate. There were photographers, reporters, loads of people – it was like a big street party. Everyone was congratulating them.

  Like always, the twins got what they wanted, and soon they had a tight hold of the Hideaway. They renamed it ‘El Morocco’. David thinks that was Ronnie’s idea. He’d become a big fan of Tangiers and his flat at Cedra Court was done up like some Middle Eastern oasis. Charlie Kray took the club over through a holding company. There was yet another big party. For Ron it was simply a way of saying: ‘Up yours’ to the Establishment. Alfie and David got into trouble that night; in fact they got barred for chatting up the cigarette girls. But it wasn’t for long.

  The good times continued, with the Krays at the heart of the sixties nightclub scene. David told me how they were in El Morocco one night when Ronnie pointed out the actor Edmund Purdom (who was very famous at the time) to him. ‘See him? I want you to meet him here tomorrow at ten and bring him over to Vallance Road,’ he said, like it was the most normal thing in the world to pick up a film star and take him to a little terraced house in the East End. So the next day he met Edmund Purdom as arranged and took him over to the Krays’ house. Ronnie called out, ‘Mum, make us a cup of tea?’

  When Violet came in with the tray she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  ‘Is that really him? In our house?’ Ronnie introduced her to him. When Viole
t had gone out, Ronnie handed the actor two hundred pounds, saying, ‘Give it back to me when you can.’

  But it wasn’t just film stars that David got to drive around. He was in El Morocco one night when Ronnie gave him orders to pick up someone the next day – someone who was to become far more famous than any sixties matinee idol … but only after he was dead.

  Ronnie told him: ‘Right, Dave, go out tomorrow morning and pick Jack the Hat up at Aldgate at 10 a.m.’ David said ‘All right,’ without the faintest idea as to why. The next morning he found Jack standing on the corner waiting for him. He told him to drive down Commercial Road, do a left and pull up. Jack then said: ‘Don’t move from here. I won’t be a minute.’

  Jack McVitie was an armed robber, getting a bit pissed a bit too often, taking too many of the drugs he was peddling, but otherwise inoffensive enough. He wore that trilby hat to hide a bald patch. He was very sensitive about it.

  David waited patiently in the car, glancing up in the mirror a few minutes later to see Jack running towards him with a bag in his hand. He’d just robbed a bank. David couldn’t believe it. Jumping into the car, Jack shouted: ‘Get off the manor, I’ve just done a bank!’

  David had just acted as an accessory to a bank robbery without even knowing about it. He never got a penny for it. Later he said to me, ‘I was just used, stupid gofer that I was. I didn’t dare complain or Ronnie would just tell me to shut up or he’d give me a slap.’

  David told me about another crazy night when he and Alfie were summoned to go round to see the Colonel at Vallance Road about seven in the evening.

  Alfie got out of the car and David went to park round the back. Ronnie came out, all suited and booted and said: ‘Where’s your car? I want you to drop me somewhere.’ So they went back to the car, and Ronnie jumped in the front, Alfie got in the back, and David took his place behind the steering wheel.