Bringing Down the Krays (20 page)

Jack’s body vanished. There were plenty of rumours. It was in the concrete foundations of a supermarket, it was in a motorway flyover, it had been fed to animals, burned in a hospital incinerator. One story had it dumped over a railway line near Cedra Court.

Time passes. But now there’s another big rumour – that there’s a new copper after the Krays. I’m hearing it’s Leonard Read, ‘Nipper’, the little terrier who got burned in the Hideaway club affair – when I was taking messages from Ronnie out of Brixton to put the frighteners on Hew McCowan.

This time he’s got a team working outside the Yard. If it’s true then the twins have got a problem. In autumn 1967 there were rumours about a cozzer called Mooney going round the East End talking to people about the Blind Beggar. They won’t leave it alone.

Then we start hearing that the twins had been nicked. By now it’s May 1968. Could it be true? I got another warning from the Krays messenger, saying that if the police did come sniffing around asking questions I was to stay schtum – to not say a thing and ask for my lawyer. That was a message from the twins.

I told him directly: ‘Fuck them and their message. You’ve told me this about five times. I don’t need you to tell me what to do.’

My cellmate, a face called Terry Millman, even offered to put the guy down the laundry chute if he didn’t stop hassling me. But now it was really happening. The rumour was true. Reggie and Ronnie really were on remand. Read was putting together the charges for a full trial. Well, he’d better not come round me, I thought. I was not going to grass. Nor would anyone in my family.

I’d already been trying to get to an open prison in order to get myself easier living conditions. It was very strict in Maidstone at the time. But each time I put an application in, the answer came back: ‘Never.’ I couldn’t know it at the time, but the Krays and everything to do with them was more sensitive than ever at the Yard. They weren’t going to risk losing sight of me.

I tried again for a transfer, expecting another knock-back. Then I was called in by the governor and told I was going to Ford Open Prison in West Sussex.

When I got to Ford I was disappointed to find there were about twenty of us in each dormitory. I’d have preferred to be back in Maidstone, back in my old cell. They allocated me a job, to break the tarmac of an old airfield opposite the prison with pickaxe handles. It was good exercise but I’d have terrible blisters by the end of each day.

Every lunchtime we would have a parade so the screws could count the number of prisoners and make sure no one had run away. First you heard your name shouted out and written on a board up in front of you. You then had to get into working party lines as instructed. They would then tell us which among us had visits, or appointments of any kind. All of a sudden one day I heard my name: ‘Teale, hospital, over there.’

I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. I had nothing wrong with me and hadn’t complained of anything. I asked, ‘Me? What for?’ and the two screws who were with me told me it was a check-up. ‘What’s happening? What have I done?’

They told me I had to go over to the hospital. When I asked why they wouldn’t tell me, but just told me a car would be coming to pick me up. Shortly afterwards, a car pulled up at the gates driven by a screw. Once we were in the car together I asked him again: ‘Where are we going?’ But he just replied: ‘I don’t know.’

After about half an hour’s drive we pulled up at the back of a police station in Littlehampton, taking the lift up quite a few floors until we reached a large room with a huge window, like a great wall of glass, where you could see the whole of the south coast spread out below.

Suddenly two plain-clothes policemen came in, full of apologies and strangely polite. ‘Sorry we’re late, Dave, only we got caught up in traffic on the way from London. Do you want a cup of tea and something to eat? Some fags?’ One threw a packet of twenty fags down on the table. ‘Do you want anything else?’ They were acting like we were mates.

They were two detective sergeants – Nipper Read’s men, as I later found out. Then it started:

‘You know that the twins have been arrested?’ one said.

‘I had heard that,’ I said.

At that, the screw left the room and one of the detectives told me: ‘So you know the twins have been nicked and they are going to go away for a long time. What do you know about them?’

I didn’t know what to say. I’d had that warning. ‘Not a lot,’ I answered.

The officer replied with heavy sarcasm: ‘Oh, you don’t, do you? And you don’t know anything about the Cornell murder either, I suppose?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I answered.

‘Well, there are lots of rumours flying round, I suppose you’ve heard… When we asked Ronnie Kray about it, he said that all he knew was that “the Teales were involved”. That’s what Ronnie told my governor.’

‘You’ve got to be joking!’ I said. I couldn’t believe that even Ronnie would try a stunt like that. But I still stuck to the line that I didn’t know the Krays and that I had nothing to say.

He then started asking me to write a statement. He was very insistent.

‘I can’t do that. I’ve told you I’ve got nothing to say. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Leave me alone.’

Finally they agreed to take me back to the prison. Returning to my dormitory I didn’t sleep a wink, worrying about what this was all about, and what was going to happen. Next day at about ten in the morning came the message that I had to be sent to the ‘hospital’ again. At least this time I knew what to expect. On arrival I was given a fag and a cup of tea.

‘Right, Dave,’ the officer said, and pulled a load of photos from his desk drawer.

They were of me, of my wife, Christine and my children, of Alfie, Bobby, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, all going in and out of the flat in Moresby Road. We’re going shopping, getting in and out of my car, going to Vallance Road, different pubs, lots of us at Steeple Bay, the caravan site. They were surveillance photos. They had clearly been taken when practically the whole Firm had been camped out at my place after the Cornell killing. I don’t know what chilled me more, the memory of that time two years before or the fact the coppers knew all about it. How did they know? Why hadn’t they stormed the place?

‘So you don’t know the twins?’ he asked again.

‘Well, I do know them… They used to go up my mother’s club in Islington.’

‘But you still don’t want to make a statement?’

‘No.’

At that moment, the telephone rang. Picking up the receiver, the officer answered, ‘Yes, he’s here. Do you want to speak to him?’

Passing the receiver across the table to me, he whispered conspiratorially: ‘It’s the wife!’

I felt myself starting to sweat with anxiety. ‘Hello, love. You all right? Where are you?’ I said.

‘Hello, Dave. I’m in Albany Street Police Station. They brought me here. They’ve been round a few times asking about Ronnie Kray and the Cornell murder. They’ve taken the photos of us and the Krays, the ones that were taken down at the caravan. I had to give them to them.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about it. Where’s the kids?’

‘They’ve got a policewoman looking after them.’

Telling Christine not to worry about a thing, I put the receiver down with a shaking hand.

‘Listen, Dave,’ said the officer now. ‘I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You and your wife are both going to make statements. You know your mother has been nicked?’

Well, I didn’t know. I just sat there with my mouth open. What the hell was this? It had to be some kind of trick. It had to be just a crazy story to make me say something. Surely.

‘It’s true,’ said the copper, ‘and just to prove it, tomorrow we’ll show you the court papers.’

‘Nipper Read is working on all this in Tintagel,’ the other policeman present told me. ‘You’re going to be doing a lot of bird if you don’t tell us what happened on the night of 9 March 1966 when you drove Reggie Kray from Bethnal Green to Walthamstow.’

‘Alfie and Bobby have made statements,’ the copper continued (I found out later that Bobby in fact had yet to do so). ‘I suggest you do the same. Do you realise you could be charged with harbouring a murderer? If you don’t play right by us you’ll be looking at twelve to fifteen years, your wife and mother could both get five, and your kids will end up in care. If you want to make a statement tomorrow morning, we will pick you up early and take you down to London. The other prisoners will be told you’re to have an operation so that no one starts asking too many questions.’

There was no way out. Stuck between the twins and the police, we were now completely cornered.

I answered: ‘You’ve got a deal.’

Early the next morning they came to pick me up. On the drive to London I asked if I could see my wife. They told me I couldn’t see her yet, but that after I’d made the statement, I’d be allowed to see her.

So I’m taken from West Sussex and smuggled into an anonymous office block across the Thames from the House of Commons. It’s 2 July 1968. I recognise Inspector Read from the time at the Hideaway and the McCowan business. And he recognises me. ‘Hello, Dave, how are you?’ He could not have been friendlier.

He was surrounded by piles of photos. He told me they’d got everything on me but he wanted me to continue giving them information. A couple of police officers took me downstairs to the canteen to have something to eat before taking me into a large room where one wall was completely covered in pictures of the twins at Vallance Road, Steeple Bay, everywhere, with all the members of the Firm. My brothers and I are in loads of them.

Just to make the point, the police showed me Ronnie’s statement, claiming: ‘All I know about the Cornell killing is that the Teales were involved.’ I recognised his childish scrawl from the letter and cards I’d seen him write in Vallance Road, so I knew it was really his statement.

I told Read and his team what they needed to know. How the twins had moved in on the 66, how Ronnie had pursued me and used my flat as a meeting place. I told them about the night of the phone call from Madge’s and how I had driven to Tapp Street with my brothers. How Reggie had got in my car and told me to ‘get them off the manor’, the drive to Walthamstow and the days of mayhem that had followed. Read loved it. ‘That’s good, David, that’s great, and then what happened…?’

Nipper Read told me what he wanted to happen. ‘What we want you to do is to go to Bow Street first. That is where the committal proceedings will be before the main trial. The prosecution are going to ask you some questions and you’ve got to tell them everything you know,’ he said.

I agreed to everything.

They took me to visit my wife, and to the pub. I knew that they wanted to talk to her as well – that she was going to have to give a statement. I told her not to worry and to say what she knew. They came round the next day, by which time I’d been taken back to Ford Prison. It was 3 July 1968.

I found out what she told them, a little afterwards. She’d given them lots of family photographs of us with the Krays at Steeple Bay. She said that I’d come home that night two years earlier ‘with some friends’ who she recognised. Ronnie had asked ‘permission’ to stay (hardly) and said ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ to the Firm when he saw her. Well, that bit was true.

She told them how there had been all sorts of comings and goings, how Alfie had not been allowed to go home on his own. How Alfie had said: ‘What do they think we are… cunts?’ – meaning he didn’t like the way Reggie and Ronnie were dominating him.

‘There were a few drinking parties held at the flat. I think Madge’s daughter came to the flat one night. She was friendly with Bobby Teale,’ Christine told them. It’s in the statement she gave, I’ve seen it.

On the last night before they finally all left, Ronnie, Reggie, Ian Barrie, me and my brothers had all gone out to the pub they called the ‘Dead Pub’, she told them, when a policemen knocked on the door asking about a burglar being held at the flat. She had shown the policeman round. That’s what Christine said anyway. And to be frank, her version might have been nearer the truth.