Bringing Down the Krays (6 page)

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-seven. 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.

There were jellied eels and mash at Queen Mary College over the road, then it was all back to the Kentucky Club so everyone could have their photos taken with the twins. Not Lord Snowdon, sadly. Perhaps he’d been warned off. All the women, including the film’s star, Barbara Windsor, were done
up in furs and diamonds. She wasn’t that famous then but soon would be. My brothers told me she was laughing that dirty laugh of hers and trying hard not to swear too much.

Frances Shea was there with Reggie along with James Booth and George Sewell, the male stars of the film. Alfie had persuaded Victor Spinetti, the actor, to come. The singer Lenny Peters out of Peters and Lee was there, but there weren’t the really big stars that Ronnie wanted. I don’t know who he was expecting. Did he really think Elizabeth Taylor was on her way to join him and Reggie for a brown ale?

Ronnie went mad. It was his big night. It just wasn’t big enough. They went back to Esmeralda’s Barn in Knightsbridge for even more drinking.

In any case, the Kentucky did not last long after its turn in the spotlight. Just like the Double R, the police objected to the renewal of the club’s licence. The Kentucky closed. But pretty soon Ron took the 66 Club off our mother. He promised to buy it: ‘I’ll sort the money out later,’ he said. But of course he never did.

Dad was too old to make much of a fight of it. Mum was heartbroken. She loved the business and she wasn’t yet forty. It was the family’s living and there were still loads of young ones to support. It would have been a nice little earner, just at the time the London club scene was booming. But now it was lost to us. And because my brothers and I were off doing our own stuff, making our own way in the world, we couldn’t badmouth the Krays too much, despite our private reservations about what had happened.

By this time the Double R, the club in the Mile End Road, was long over (the licence was not renewed by the local authorities), but Ronnie still had the Green Dragon in Stepney and Esmeralda’s Barn in Knightsbridge. And now he had the 66. He felt safe round our mother’s and he was on the plot, in the area that he wanted, on the way towards the West End.

Alfie told me what Ronnie used to say about Mum’s club. ‘This is perfect for us,’ he would smile. ‘A nice straight, clean little club, the ideal place to make a meet.’ His enemies didn’t know about it – it was a place no one would dream of looking for him.

Meanwhile Alfie had got into the club scene himself as a partner in a place called the Two Decks in Rupert Court, on the south side of Shaftesbury Avenue in Soho. I never saw it, but I know he’d fitted out the place like a ship, with portholes, brass lamps, that sort of thing. And I was the one who liked boats. He got some big names in there, he told me: Danny La Rue, Frankie Howerd, Victor Spinetti, Shirley Bassey, Brian Epstein. He did well with it.

Alfie confessed to me how much of the time he’d spend drinking away the profits in company with some serious Soho drinkers – like the painter Francis Bacon, the actor John Hurt and the composer Lionel Bart. He told me he’d never let Ronnie near the Two Decks. If he had found out about it, he would have moved in, just as he and Reggie always did. To make the point, Alfie told me the story about what happened with his tailor friend, Paul of Berwick Street.

Ronnie was always admiring my brothers’ suits. So one day he told Alfie he wanted some suits made and asked him to
arrange for Paul to come round to his flat and to bring some samples of material. David was there too, followed by Ronnie, Charlie and a few other members of the Firm. At that time Reggie was away.

Sitting down in Alfie’s front room, Ronnie ordered about twenty-five suits, telling Charlie to pick out two or three for himself as well some for the rest of the Firm. Paul was very pleased, thanking Ronnie and arranging fittings for the following week.

So the next week everyone was back at Alfie’s flat again. Alfie watched Paul getting the suits out of the boot of his car. He then laid them out one by one over the back of Alfie’s sofa, with the labels marking out who each one belonged to: ‘Ronnie’, ‘Charlie’, ‘Teddy’ or whoever. Paul then fitted the suits on each member of the Firm, tearing the arms out of the jackets the way tailors do and hanging each one up carefully on the dado rail afterwards. Two weeks later another fitting was arranged, at which point Paul politely asked Ronnie if he could have some money as a deposit in order to finish off the work.

Ronnie’s expression turned murderous and, picking Paul up by the throat, he snarled, ‘Don’t you ever ask me for money again. If I feel like it, I’ll send Alfie round with something for you. Now just get the suits finished!’

Ronnie and Charlie got their suits. But Ronnie never gave Alfie any money for Paul – and my brothers lost the best tailor they ever had
.

CHAPTER 5

BUNGS AND BODIES

BY 1963 RONNIE
had got tired of Vallance Road and the caravan round the back, and had moved into an apartment in a block of flats called Cedra Court in Upper Clapton. Our mum and dad were already living there – they had got a flat through the Freemasons. My parents found Ronnie a gaff there, number 8 on the first floor. Reggie got a flat on the ground floor. A face called Leslie Holt lived upstairs. That nice, respectable block of flats was going to see some very strange goings-on.

Ronnie was fantasising about being a legitimate businessman. Reggie was actually doing something about it, making plans to go into betting shops and restaurants – even a ‘security’ firm. The money-man Leslie Payne had really got them at it. But the first thing they needed to do was button up the police even tighter. Even if they had vague intentions of going legit, the Old Bill were all as crooked as the criminals they were ostensibly trying to catch. In those days you couldn’t run a club unless you gave a bung to the local police or they’d close you down. That’s what our dad did when he was still running the 66, all the time, just in order to stay open.

So the Krays needed my brothers all the more. They had David and Alfie running all sorts of errands. Moving people, moving guns, moving money. After we’d lost the 66, Alfie had to set Mum up in a new business, a pie and mash shop in Stoke Newington. Perhaps it was just as well, because under the new management the 66 was now the Krays’ back office, ideal for discreet meets with the Old Bill.

But these were not just the local coppers from the Upper Street nick. This was West End Central and the Yard. My brother David saw it all for himself. He was in the 66 early one afternoon when two men rang the doorbell. David let them in. He’d already been told they were coming by Ron. ‘I’ve got someone coming in tomorrow, I’ve got a meet here,’ he’d told David. So when the men asked him, ‘Anyone in?’ he knew who they were talking about. He also understood full well that they were plain-clothes coppers.

David gave them each a drink. He told them there was no one here yet, but they should wait and the Colonel would be along soon. David knew that Ron was in fact waiting in the pub over the road on Islington Green, downing drinks, watching the door to the club to see if anyone was being dropped off or if anyone else was with them, hanging about outside.

When Ron was sure it was just the two of them, he came in. David heard him asking them outright: ‘Got any tapes on you?’ – meaning were they wired up.

After that David stayed out of it. Of course he did. Whether they were paying for information or grassing up someone they wanted put away, he knew it would be more than his life was
worth to get involved. While the three of them talked, he busied himself behind the bar, getting ready to open the club a few hours later. They’d do all their business before then, before anyone came into the club, and the Old Bill would creep out before anyone saw them.

That’s how it was generally. My brothers never really knew what the twins were doing at the beginning and didn’t want to know. But then of course they did know, by which time they were too excited by it, or too frightened, or both, not to do what Ronnie wanted.

Ronnie was in the club at lunchtime another day with another couple of cops, and David saw him giving them a packet, a white envelope. They went on talking for a while and then Ron got up, went over to the bar, put his hand in his pocket and got out a wad of notes. He pulled a few out, walked back over and put it down on the table in front of them, saying: ‘There you are, you’d better cop that as well.’

David explained to me how it went. The police needed bodies as well as bungs. Money was lovely but the coppers had to get their books right. It was no use the Krays giving them loads of money and no one getting nicked. They’d pass envelopes of cash – but they’d also inform on anyone they wanted to see out of the way. If the Krays did a job with someone who then didn’t give them the lion’s share of the readies, a couple of weeks afterwards the former partner would find himself arrested.

Some of the coppers out of West End Central were especially corrupt. Their line was: ‘I will help you, and I will leave you alone. If you’re going to be raided I will let you know in advance. But
I need a pension for that – and to satisfy my governors, I need a body once a month.’ So that’s how it worked for the twins.