Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (11 page)

Before anything could happen, Y, who was the leading member of the firm, said to me, ‘What are we all arguing about? We should all be in this together. Let’s have a drink.’

Then he said: ‘We’d like to meet the twins.’

‘Right, I’ll see what I can do,’ I said.

I knew, and so did Chris, that they wanted to see how powerful we were. I explained to the twins what had happened, and they agreed to hold a meet in a pub near Vallance Road.

This firm came down to London, and they went home very impressed. We enjoyed very good standing in Birmingham after that. We saw members of Y’s gang from time to time, and if we were in company they would send over a drink and leave.

However, we didn’t usually have to go to these lengths to win all the little challenges that were coming at us up there. One argument involved a boxer called Johnny Prescott, who was well respected and well liked in Birmingham, but he had upset Chris by letting him down on a meet. Shortly after this, Chris, Nicky and I were in the Elbow, a local club. Johnny Prescott sent us over drinks, and Chris slapped them back down on the bar. A slanging match broke out, which ended with my brother offering Prescott out to the car park.

One of his associates shouted, ‘You people don’t fight with your fists. You fight with guns and knives, and an argument is never forgotten.’

Nicky jumped up and said, ‘I fight with my fists. You want it with me?’ And he threw his coat off. The other lot backed out of it then. Most people did.

But we were always ready and able for violence in the face of a challenge. It was vital for us to protect and promote our reputation and that of the twins. This was our priority, and it sometimes meant that we had to dish out a little bit of Kray justice. The twins could not, and would not, allow anyone to get away with taking a liberty.

There was an incident, for example, with Patsy Manning. The
twins took the hump with him after giving him money to go visiting a certain individual in Parkhurst prison. Patsy didn’t bother going to visit this man, but went out drinking instead. We didn’t know anything about this at the time, but the twins found out, and Ronnie said to me, ‘Tell that Patsy Manning we want to see him.’

I went to Birmingham and spoke to Patsy. I said, ‘If there’s anything wrong, tell me, and I’ll talk to them.’ He didn’t say a word about it.

One night, back in London, I went out to a pub called the Old Horns in Bethnal Green. When I walked into the pub, the twins were there with a couple of the firm and Patsy Manning. He was standing well away from them.

I went over to say hello, and Ronnie said, ‘Invite Patsy Manning round to a party.’ If the twins were upset with anyone, an invitation to a party was a very dangerous thing. But Ronnie was right to be annoyed. Patsy was collecting money to visit the prison and he wasn’t doing it, even though he knew what he was dealing with.

I summed up the situation. ‘Look, Ron, with all due respect, I don’t think you should have to dirty your hands with this one. Leave it to us and we’ll take care of it up in Birmingham.’

Ron agreed: ‘As long as it’s taken care of, we’ll leave it to you.’

A couple of nights later, Chris and I came out of the Cedar Club and got into the car. We pulled up at the traffic lights, and Patsy Manning drove up alongside us. We hadn’t been making ourselves busy to find him. We knew where he lived and we knew his brother Alan, who owned a well-known club called the Wheel. We didn’t want to make an issue of it. If we came across him, he would get a right-hander and that would be the end of it.

We both stopped at the lights and Chris jumped out of the motor saying, ‘Look who’s here.’ He got in beside Patsy, and they followed me to Patsy’s flat. We went indoors and Chris gave him a dig which bust his eye open, telling him, ‘You know why you’re getting this,
over the man you should have been visiting, and you’re taking the dough.’ We gave him a right kicking. Later, we told Ron about it and that was the end of the matter.

We were becoming very big indeed in Birmingham and thereabouts, and it seemed we could get away with anything, despite the personal attention we were receiving from the police. We had a special squad of policemen watching us, and we felt their presence. They would openly drink in our company. It was pleasantries all round. They’d say, ‘Good evening, boys, we’re hoping you don’t have a late one tonight.’

And then there was an incident in the Piccadilly Casino in Manchester, the night we bumped into Davy Clare’s girlfriend. I was in this little casino with Chris, Peter Metcalfe and Eric Mason, who’d turned up again. Chris and I were watching the action on the roulette when a man suddenly walked over to where we were standing. Without saying a word he got out these little books, opened them and let us see that they contained photographs of the four of us. He then said, ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ and promptly walked out of the club.

It was like playing a game. The police were letting us know we were not going to get any control of the North or the Midlands. But in a sense they’d missed the boat: we were already established there. And any attempts to undermine our position were quickly dealt with. We were once told that five club owners in Birmingham had got together and decided to impose a blanket ban on us. We immediately sent out a wreath to each of them, with a message saying, ‘Sorry to hear about your recent loss. Our sincere condolences.’ That put an end to any notion of barring us from the clubs, and we found doors open wherever we went. That’s the power of fear. One night, someone threw a bottle in one of the clubs and it hit Chris on the head. The person who chucked it didn’t
realise at the time who the bottle struck. He did later. From what I understand, he immediately left Birmingham and went to live in Canada.

Fear is one thing, but continuing to command it is another. You must be known to be capable of carrying out whatever you threaten. We were known – and seen – to be more than capable of it. The customers at a Birmingham casino-diner called the Ambassadors could vouch for that, as well as the six bouncers on the door. At the time, I was using a brand-new American Mustang which I’d acquired through a long firm, while Chris was driving a Ford Galaxy 500. We pulled up in the driveway of the Ambassadors in these cars, Chris and I got out and marched into the building, straight past the bouncers in their dinner suits. We were looking for someone. In front of a whole crowd of people we dragged the man we wanted out of there. No one did a thing. We gave him a right thumping there and then. We’d supplied him with money for gambling, and he’d tried to have us over.

It wasn’t the first time someone had tried this, although it was unusual. For the most part we made a killing from gambling, financing the games and then taking our percentages. One man, however, took a £500 loan from us on the understanding we’d see him three days later in the Albany Hotel in the middle of Birmingham. Up there we always used to have our meets in hotel bars, never pubs. But he didn’t turn up. We then heard that this man, Graham, had won a large amount of money. We always had one of the girls in the casinos straightened out, giving her money to tell us what was going on. He’d obviously done a runner.

Some time later, I booked into the Albany for a short stay. I came out of my room one day and there in the foyer was Graham with a girl. He didn’t see me. I discovered he was in the next room to me, and I immediately informed my brother. Up came Chris. We knocked on the door, the girl opened it and we burst in. Chris
ripped the television off the stand it was sitting on and threw it at Graham. Then we gave him a pistol-whipping. We confiscated the money he owed us, which was more or less all he had in cash in the room, and told him to leave Birmingham and never come back. He went abroad.

It wasn’t as though we were picking on an innocent person. People like Graham approached us, they knew we were criminals and they knew the rules. If they broke those rules, they knew what to expect, and they couldn’t go to the law for sympathy. Our attitude was either they paid us or we paid them. Everybody accepted that from the beginning, so nine times out of ten violence was never necessary. But if anybody was stupid enough to try and take a liberty, we would stop it automatically, even if some of what we had to do was unpleasant.

At this stage in our career, as I have mentioned, we didn’t have to tout for business. People from all walks of life were coming to us with propositions, like the two Jewish car dealers in Birmingham who wanted to talk to us about a Rolls-Royce. They were very peeved because they’d been ripped off by another car dealer called Nick, who had a business in Harrow, northwest London.

This Nick, whose surname I can’t divulge, was a very rich man. He had picked up a paper one day and seen an advertisement for a Rolls for £8,000, so he sent a young guy of nineteen to Birmingham to put a £2,000 deposit on the car. The young lad also offered a cheque for the outstanding amount. It wasn’t even a legal deal – you couldn’t have credit unless you were over twenty-one – but the young guy was very sharp and the Birmingham dealers went for it hook, line and sinker. Then the cheque bounced, too, so they were fucked for £6,000.

They gave us all the details, but what they didn’t tell us was that they had had Nick over a year or so earlier for a car out of his
company in Harrow. What Nick was doing was getting one back at them.

I asked, ‘What’s in it for us?’

They said, ‘If you can recover the car, we’ll give you half its value.’

We took the job on condition we were given £500 expenses up front. They came to London with us, booked us into the Russell Hotel in Russell Square and took us to Nick’s pitch. It was lovely. He had Bentleys, Rollers, all sorts of expensive cars there. You could tell at a glance that he was loaded.

This is where we called our old bus driver friend Paddy Dinnear in again. Chris and I had a talk with him and we decided to pile up to this place in Harrow four-handed. We gave Paddy a pick-axe handle and told him to run into Nick’s office, smash it across his desk and say, ‘You fucked us out of £6,000. We want it now or you’re in trouble.’ We agreed that Chris and I would follow within a couple of minutes and hold him back.

He did exactly what we asked. Chris and I went in, pulled Paddy away from Nick, who was on the floor in a terrible panic, and said, ‘We want the car or we want the money.’

He was whimpering, ‘I’ll give you anything you want, but don’t hurt me.’ Then he asked, ‘Can I talk to you?’

I said, ‘You can talk to us all day long, but we still want the car or the cash.’

He then gave us his side of it, and told us about the Jewish car dealers having him over. ‘The car doesn’t mean a thing to me,’ he said, ‘I just don’t want
them
to have it. If you boys want to make a nice killing I’ll give you the value of the car, and I’ll also give you a cheque – which the bank won’t pay out – for you to give the Birmingham men.’

And he did. He gave us our money, and he wrote a cheque for £8000, making a deliberate error so that it would not be paid. We
went back to the dealers in Birmingham and told them we had the dough. I waved the cheque in front of their faces, put it away again and said, ‘You’re not getting this until you give us our half of the money in cash.’ One of them came to the bank with me and paid over £4,000. Then I handed him the cheque, which he immediately put in his pocket. Five days later, he realised he’d been had.

So we made £12,000, plus expenses. Nick lost £8,000. And the Birmingham car dealers got burnt very badly, to the tune of £18,500. The whole issue was this: they went to criminals. As the saying goes, you live by it, you die by it.

But the story didn’t end there. This Nick from Harrow got in touch with me and Chris and said: ‘I’ve always got a use for people like you two. I’m willing to put you on a retainer and, should I ever need you, I’ll call upon your services.’

I replied, ‘I do a lot of work for the Kray brothers. I’ll have to see what they think about it, and we’ll take it from there.’ When I mentioned it to the twins, Ronnie said, ‘Keep it for yourself.’

From then on, I started meeting Nick at the bar of the London Hilton Hotel every Friday to collect a retainer of £800. Chris and I would have £300 each and my Nicky £200. Nick, through his wealth and through paying out money at that rate, was leaving himself open to a lot of things. I phoned him up one night from a call box fifty yards from his house and told him I wanted to see him immediately. He said, ‘I’ll see you in an hour.’ I got there within five minutes. Chris was waiting outside, round the corner, because Nick claimed my eldest brother made him feel uncomfortable.

A young boy wearing a white pinny answered the door. I said, ‘Is Nick there?’ I walked in and went straight into the bedroom. Nick was in bed with another young boy with a pinny on. I said, ‘It’s not my thing, what I’m looking at here, but I have to stay here to tell you that we need £5,000 right away.’

‘I’ll have to give it to you tomorrow,’ he answered. I said, ‘We need it urgently.’

He asked me to wait outside the room. I did, but I was watching what he was doing through the crack in the door. He got out of bed, and I saw he was dressed as a woman. Then he moved the bed away from the wall to reveal a built-in safe. I saw him count out £5,000. He called me in five minutes later, by which time he was back in bed.

‘Thanks for the cash,’ I said. ‘By the way, we’ll see you again next week.’ And we upped his money to £1,000 a week. I was still drawing it six months after I was nicked for the McVitie murder. That’s what a violent reputation can do for you.

He knew we were connected. He knew he was being had over. He knew what we were up to. It was protection money. Protection he never even needed.

Cars and car dealers were a recurring feature of our time in Birmingham. Another one who fell in love with the romantic idea of bringing criminals into his life was a man called Tony Hart, who acquired my Mustang and Chris’s Galaxy 500 for us.

Hart, an ex-club bouncer with the gift of the gab, was the proprietor of a garage and car wash company which was virtually on its knees when he invited Chris in to help revive the business. I went to Walsall, just outside Birmingham, to meet him. He wanted to slaughter the garage, make a quick profit out of it and then get rid of it. He asked me, ‘What prison sentence would I get if I ran this as a long firm?’