Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (15 page)

On the face of it, things couldn’t have looked better for the Kray firm. The twins were at the height of their power and there was no opposition: the law had done them a favour by nicking the Richardson brothers, Charlie and Eddie, and the rest of their gang.

There had been a big rivalry with the Richardsons, dating back to when I first started working and drinking in the West End, with certain incidents causing a build-up of ill feeling. Looking back, there was no need for it. It was all to do with personality clashes and bravado, with everybody doing well and congregating in the same places. We all used clubs like the Astor and the Starlight, for instance, and if a member of one firm walked in and saw five members of another, words weren’t necessary. It wasn’t what was said, it was the whole feel of it. A clash had to come.

Up to then everybody had tended to keep to their own side of things, their own territory, not treading on each other’s toes within the circles. The Richardsons were powerful in south London, we were powerful on our side of the water, and we had other firms connected and allied to each of us throughout London. But then the so-called Swinging Sixties took off.

It was a boom time, and the West End was where it all happened. Everybody wanted a slice of that. The opportunities were there for all of us to get a good living, but people are greedy. Each firm wanted a bit more than the other, so of course it caused conflicts and developed into a power struggle. Several firms were getting their whack out of the West End, but the twins organised it and wound up with a larger slice. In time, though, too many people started trying to jump over each other, especially the south London lot. The Richardsons, who were well known and feared, were expanding fast.

The twins called a meet in a club just south of the river, with the
intention of sorting it out. All of the firms in London were expected to attend. The Richardsons, obviously, were invited, but did not send any representatives, which was a direct challenge. So it was decided, rightly or wrongly, that something should be done about them. But unfortunately they were all nicked, barring George Cornell, before anything could happen.

There was a shoot-out in a club called Mr Smith’s in Catford, when the Richardsons and another south London gang had a confrontation. It was alleged that Eddie Richardson was one of the leaders and that he jumped up and challenged the other firm by saying, ‘No more drinks unless you ask me.’ I don’t know the truth of that, because I wasn’t there.

Eddie Richardson was more of a fighter, more of a villain, than his brother Charlie. He was the sort of man who, when he put his mind to something, would do it, and he wouldn’t take shit from anyone.

Charlie, on the other hand, never struck me as a bloodthirsty man. He was first and foremost a businessman, a car dealer, and although he knew his roots, he never suffered fools gladly; he could be hard when he had to be. Allegations were later made that he held kangaroo courts, sat with a wig and gown on, sentenced his victims to torture and generally did outlandish things. I think this was an exaggeration. Charlie never came across to me in that way, although they did have business to do, the Richardsons, and they ran a formidable empire.

They were faced with an equally heavy gang on the night of the Mr Smith’s affair, and all hell broke loose. Frankie Fraser, who was with the Richardsons, was hit by gunfire, and Dickie Hart, a good friend of the twins who happened to be there at the time, was shot dead. Although the twins were not involved in the Mr Smith’s row, their allegiance to other people, namely Dickie Hart, brought them directly into conflict. Ronnie was all for an out-and-out war, and
there could only be one winner: Ronnie Kray. With the rest of the Richardsons under lock and key, Ronnie shot George Cornell through the head a day or two later as a come-back, and also as a response to Cornell’s public denouncement of him as a ‘poof’.

The words ‘underworld’ and ‘gangsters’ started coming into play more and more, and the papers were talking about ‘leading underworld characters’. What does that mean? A number of men who drank together in a pub in the East End?

These days such a thing as an underworld exists even less than it did then. Very few successful professional criminals associate with each other. They are very paranoid. They try to live a middle-class life where everything looks legal even though it isn’t. I won’t deny there are people who rob security vans and banks, using members of different firms. But I prefer to call them ‘circles’. And ‘gangster’ is a word I find very embarrassing. I hate to be called that – it’s a movie name.

The things we did, we referred to as business. We didn’t do them for fun. We didn’t see any point in gaining a reputation only to get nothing out of it. Our game didn’t involve pleasure; we did it professionally. It was a business thing, and a business thing only. It was never personal, unless the challenge to the authority of the firm was issued on a personal level. If violence had to be done in a professional way to someone else, it was always referred to as business.

Nothing was ever done without good reason. Reputations were there to be pulled down, and it was the twins’ job to make sure that nobody could do that. They succeeded brilliantly. They were a
one-off
: if anybody had the right to be called ‘gangsters’, they did. In a way they belonged in the Chicago days, and that’s how they were viewed at the time.

They did almost all of their own villainy, even though they didn’t
have to. Granted, they had to be seen to be able to do it, where violence was concerned, but they had established that long ago. I think they were the type of people who wanted to be able to say, ‘Look, don’t worry about that, we don’t need anyone.’

When the Mafia men came over the twins looked after them well, but they let it be known that they were not going to hand over any of their business interests in London. They were the guv’nors. I think the Mafia were a bit wary of them, especially Ronnie, but they did respect them.

And so, for a while, life carried on profitably and without competition; and even though the twins, unknowingly, had one or two bad apples in the firm, they still had some good men around them. Ian Barrie, Ronnie’s personal minder and an ex-military man, had had an accident in a tank. It had caught fire, leaving him badly scarred from his ear right the way down one side of his neck. It didn’t spoil his looks, though, and I thought it gave him a better character. Ian was thoroughly trustworthy. He never spoke about what he got involved in – not even Ronnie’s shooting of Cornell, which he witnessed – and he never complained, before or after the convictions. He was genuine and gentlemanly, a very deep thinker who never showed his feelings or put anyone down. Everything he said was constructive. He did what he thought he had to do, and that was it. He gave us help and back-up no matter what, and I never heard anyone say a bad word about him. He was very well thought of by the twins and the rest of us. Ronnie could never have picked a better man: he was a credit to Scotland.

The twins were also very lucky to have someone like Ronnie Bender around them. He was another ex-Army man, a big, jovial, good-looking fella and an accomplished all-round sportsman, hence his nickname of the Captain. He was very good-humoured by nature – until someone upset him, and then he could be a handful,
as tough as they come. He wasn’t someone to rub up the wrong way: he would stand up to anybody. Ronnie was a man’s man, a bloke who proved himself at the end of the day and who always showed concern for people, regardless of his own problems. He was a diamond.

Big Pat Connolly was another very likeable character. Huge in both height and weight, Big Pat came in and out of the firm from time to time as a front-line soldier. He was a minder in various clubs, and if there was an immediate problem anywhere the twins would put him on the door. Just after the murder of George Cornell, Pat was stationed in Vallance Road with a pump action shotgun and told to stay there and mind the door of the Krays’ house. Cornell’s widow went round there, threw a brick through the window and caused a scene. Pat didn’t know what she was on about, and simply told her to go away.

Chris and I attracted more than our share of attention from the police throughout 1967: we were being investigated on suspicion of two murders. One was the killing of a man called Tony Mafia, who was a very good friend of another villain, Buller Ward.

Ward lived at Haggerston, same as us, and he knew our parents. He had close ties with leading figures in the London circles, and he looked the part. Chris and I had had our own connections with the family from an early age. One day at the beginning of the fifties, we were walking along the Regents Canal between Hoxton and Queensbridge Road when a kid fell in the water. Unbeknown to us it was Buller Ward’s son, Bonner, and he always respected us for saving him from drowning.

Buller always seemed pretty sociable to us, but in the middle to late sixties he had fallen foul of the twins and was keeping away from their company. Tony Mafia, his friend, had also upset certain people in the circles. He was getting around the West End clubs
where he was known as the Magpie, because he would get hold of gems and lumps of gold and bullion, which he then stored in vaults.

One day Nicky and I went to the Regency with the twins, Albert Donaghue, Scotch Jack Dickson and a few others. Buller Ward was with Tony Mafia at the bar. Reggie Kray said to Buller: ‘Tell Tony Mafia I want to see him downstairs.’ Next thing, Buller warned Mafia to get out of the club. The minute that happened, Reggie got the hump and gave Buller Ward a right-hander.

Ward said to him, ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Reggie.’ Without further ado, Reggie pulled out a knife and slashed him across the face. A bit of blood spattered on to a fella who was passing by. He said to Reggie, ‘Be careful what you’re doing.’

Ronnie stabbed him in the shoulder and replied: ‘You’d better be fucking careful yourself.’

One night, Tony Mafia was found behind the wheel of a car, shot in the back of the head, on the Southend arterial road in Essex. The police believed Chris, Nicky and I had something to do with it, and they pulled us in and questioned us. I didn’t deny that I knew Mafia, and I didn’t deny that I knew violence had been used on him by various people he had had skirmishes with in the past. But I certainly denied any involvement in his death: it was nothing to do with us. The point was that the twins and those around them were being suspected of every violent incident that occurred: ‘It’s the firm.’ And people were beginning to connect my brothers and me with murders: they knew we would use violence, had access to guns and were more than capable of pulling the trigger.

Meanwhile, another villain called Scotch Jack Buggy was found dead. The story goes that a police officer just happened to be fishing off a pier in Brighton and pulled up Buggy’s body, wrapped in chicken wire. It must have been a very lucky catch because Buggy had been weighted down with lumps of rock and iron.

The police inquiries led to an investigation into a small yacht
which happened to turn up in Birmingham, near Tony Hart’s garage long firm. They believed the yacht had been used to dispose of Buggy’s body. Because of that, the police decided we should be questioned. They wanted to know how this boat came to be in Birmingham, near a garage that Chris and I were involved in. It was put to me that I’d known Buggy through prison and that I was a murder suspect. The police were convinced, for a while, that Chris and I had something to do with it, and we started thinking someone was trying to fit us up. I’m not saying I knew nothing about the killing, because that would be lying, but I wasn’t involved in it. One of the culprits went to America, and the other to Switzerland.

Some years later, the subject of Buggy arose again. By this time I was in Gartree prison serving the Kray sentence, and I was approached by one of the Great Train Robbers, a small, chirpy fella called Roy The Weasel James. It was rumoured that, before he died, Buggy had been looking after the Weasel’s money. And the Weasel was asking me why Buggy had to go.

He said, ‘The money doesn’t matter to me. I just wouldn’t like to think Buggy died for it.’

I was happy to be able to tell Roy that we genuinely hadn’t had anything to do with the murder.

I
’d spoken to Jack The Hat McVitie on and off for years, but I never got to know him closely until 1967. It all began in a pub called the Mildmay Tavern in Balls Pond Road, Dalston. I often went there to see Pa Flanaghan, whose wife ran the pub; they had a family of sons whom I was also friendly with. I went in there one night early in the New Year, not long after my release from Bristol prison, with Jack The Hat and two other men called Jimmy Briggs and Patsy Murphy. I had bumped into them in another pub, the Greyhound, further along the road.

Patsy was later to become involved in the well-known seventies’ Luton Post Office robbery. He was given life and a twenty rec., on the word of a grass, and walked out of the sentence twelve years later after three different Home Secretaries had referred it back to the Court of Appeal. It was the first time fresh evidence had ever been allowed into that court. Patsy’s father, Stevie, had a club, the Senate Rooms, in the Angel, which was burned down after a fall-out with a firm in north London.

Jimmy Briggs was another one who would end up in a
well-known
trial: he was done with George Davis for a robbery at the
Bank of Cyprus. Davis had just been freed on appeal from a fifteen-year sentence for an Electricity Board job, following the famous ‘George Davis Is Innocent’ graffiti campaign of the early seventies. He was released over a technicality. When he got nicked for the Bank of Cyprus job, he got another fifteen years. It was like a
tit-for
-tat victory for the police.

Anyway, Jimmy, Patsy, Jack The Hat and I were sitting having a drink in the Mildmay this night when Patsy said to Jack The Hat, ‘Tony’s just come out of the boob [prison].’

Jack said; ‘Anything I can do for you?’ He’d done time himself, Jack, and he told me he’d been responsible for the Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson’s escape from Winson Green prison the year before. Charlie, who had been serving thirty years, hit the headlines many years later when he was shot dead by an unknown assailant in Spain in 1990.

At eleven o’clock, closing time, we went off to a club called the Tempo which had recently opened in Holloway Road at Highbury Corner. It was being run by an East End lad called Freddie Bird, an ex-docker who was only about five feet ten in height but very, very broad. He had recruited a few Geordies and Jocks with broken noses, the typical thing, from out-of-town firms, dressed them up in dickie bows and stuck them on the door, which made them a target for us lot and the rest of the London firms.

When I walked into the club with Jack The Hat, Jimmy and Patsy, I knew something wasn’t right. Freddie Bird was a bit apprehensive about letting Jack in, because he’d had a drink: he was a very unpredictable character who could be highly dangerous. Anyway, we sat down at a table and Jack, who was a Londoner, was going on about these bouncers. We had a meal, and after that a few drinks started going down. The entertainment, a female singer, began her act, and Jack started. He got up on the floor and began heckling the singer.

The Geordie blokes had a few words with him, and Freddie Bird came over saying, ‘Turn it in, Jack, she’s trying to do her act.’

Jack said to Freddie, ‘Who do you think you fucking are bringing this lot down here, Geordies and that?’

And Freddie replied, ‘That’s enough of that.’

We were in the middle of it all because we’d gone in there with Jack, and East Enders are like that: you stay with the person you walk in with. I didn’t know what Jack had on him. I always liked to know if people were tooled up, because at the time a lot were, and it was easy to walk into something.

A few more words were said and another big Geordie fella came over. Jack pushed him away. And then before it could go any further, it stopped. Freddie said, ‘That’s it, you’re barred.’

Jack apparently came back the next night and burst in with a gun, but was thrown out without any shots being fired. He then went on to the Regency where he muttered a few threats and ranted on about these northerners coming down here doing what they wanted.

Freddie later readmitted Jack to the club, but it was to lead to a lot more trouble, memorably when the singer Dorothy Squires arrived for a residency. She was then married to Roger Moore, who was starring in the TV series
The Saint
at the time, and everybody used to yell, ‘Where’s the Saint?’ He would sit over by the dressing room. On the night in question, Dorothy was doing her turn rotten drunk, staggering about and swigging from a bottle of what looked like water but was obviously spirits. But I’ll give her this: she could sing.

Jack The Hat shouted over to her, ‘What’s he like in bed, the old Saint?’

She yelled back, ‘You mind your own business, he’s a lot better than you.’ This led to a stand-up argument between Dorothy Squires and Jack The Hat. She was screaming, ‘I’ll have a fight with you,’
and everybody else was yelling, ‘Get the Saint up, he’ll get you out of this.’

Roger Moore ran out of the club, and Dorothy Squires staggered off swearing and cursing. The bouncers came in and there was a bit of an argument.

When the next act of the night, a dancer, came on, Jack got up and dropped his trousers. He was wearing a pair of swimming trunks underneath. Freddie Bird came over and blows were thrown. Freddie had no alternative now but to go to the twins.

The firm was called in for a meeting one Monday night at the Regency. About a dozen of us went from there to Freddie’s club. Within two minutes of us walking in, everyone in it had walked out. The bouncers were told to leave, and from that minute on, the twins were in charge. They just took it.

Jack carried on making trouble with lots of different people. On one occasion I was in the Mildmay Tavern when he came in drunk, about eleven o’clock, and was refused a drink. His reaction was to pull out a Colt .45 and blow out the bar. Another night, I was about to walk into the Regency when I heard two bangs. Jack The Hat and Tommy Flanaghan, a well-known Scottish face, were standing there with guns firing at one another. A bullet missed me by about six inches.

Things like this were to be bad for Jack, because they would always be reported back to the twins. He was getting into a state where he didn’t know what he was doing, challenging people and causing trouble. One night he walked into the Regency with his hand cut to bits, blood dripping everywhere he went. We put a towel round it and sent him to hospital. Another time he came into the place with an axe, made threats and started slamming the axe into the door. John Barry, who ran the club, calmed him down.

Yet another incident involving Jack occurred one night at Charlie Brown’s, a restaurant/drinker in Stamford Hill. An argument
started between Jack The Hat, Ronnie Hart and his girlfriend Blonde Vicky. She was a well-known girl around the scene, a ‘gangster groupie’, and she used to go around with a girl called Bubbles, who was with Ronnie Bender up to the time of his arrest. Jack had gone into this club drunk, asking Vicky what she was doing with Hart, and he ended up calling her a slag. Again, this was reported back to the twins, and all these little facts were building up – vital elements in any explanation of why Jack was murdered.

He was damaging the respect that people had for the firm in general and the twins in particular. Not only was he becoming an embarrassment, not only was he undermining the twins’ guarantee of peace and quiet in the pubs and clubs they protected, but he was also starting to threaten the twins themselves. It was central to the way they worked that they could not allow that from anybody. He was warned about his behaviour on many occasions, but he carried on doing the very things that he and all of us knew would lead him into serious trouble. Nobody in our circles would have dreamed of carrying on the way he did. Jack was asking for it.

Yet there was no smell of aggravation the night before the murder. Jack The Hat, Reggie, Albert Donaghue, Chris and I sat down together and had a Chinese meal and a few drinks in the Regency. If the twins had the hump with you, you knew it, but that night I detected nothing. I knew that Jack had been getting out of tune and that he’d been told about it, but he showed no signs of uneasiness. Albert Donaghue was a bit distant, but then he always was. Albert didn’t show anyone a lot of friendliness, so everything appeared to be as good as gold.

I never dreamed in a million years that twenty-four hours later Reggie would be doing him in and that Jack The Hat McVitie would become one of the most famous murder victims in British history. In the hours leading up to his death, while I sat with the rest of the firm in the Carpenters Arms, Reggie seemed to be a happy bloke,
having a drink with Violet and old man Kray. What happened between then and his arrival at the Regency a couple of hours later with murder in his eyes?

Even after the murder itself, I could not, and still cannot, portray him as a vicious killer. As I’ve said, he wasn’t himself after Frances’ death – he’d been under a lot of pressure and I don’t believe he knew what he was doing until he’d done it. He wasn’t a bad man, Reggie Kray. None of us were. We weren’t that good either, but we lived by our own code and everybody in the circles understood the rules. There are a lot worse running about today.

I regret what happened. So do Chris and Ronnie Bender. At the time of the killing, I remember thinking, ‘This is not part of my life, this is not what I’m into.’ Afterwards it was continuously on my mind, but at the same time it didn’t register. It seemed like a faraway thing, totally beyond my reckoning. And it kept coming back at the most unexpected times, no matter how much we’d hoped that the secret would remain amongst the few of us who were in that basement flat. One night, a bloke called Bobby Cannon approached me in the Regency. He said to me, like a bolt out of the blue, ‘You didn’t half do me a favour, Tony … the Hat.’

I asked, ‘What about him?’

He went, ‘I know what happened.’ And he did, roughly.

I put it down to one person telling him: Connie Whitehead, who was very friendly with Cannon at the time. I felt I had to tell the twins about what was said. They saw Cannon, and it was never repeated.

At the same time people were beginning to notice that Jack was missing, and there was a lot of speculation about what had happened to him. It was me who started the rumour that Jack had been badly burnt and killed in a car crash while trying to get away from a robbery. That one floated around for months.

Stories of another kind were also circulating. It was being said
that the police were looking at an organised gang in London, and that we were going to be nicked. Rumours started coming out of Brixton prison that they were clearing the landing for us. Where there was smoke, there was fire.

We always knew that, when it came, it would be no picnic: we would get a lot of time. We knew that society would not endorse the idea of thugs and villains running around organising crime. But the New Year of 1968 came and we were still at liberty, leading our usual lives, with Chris still based in Birmingham and me going backwards and forwards between there and London.

The twins had acquired their mansion, ‘The Brooks’, in Suffolk, and it was put about that they were thinking of turning in crime and retiring to the country, where Ronnie would lead a rural life and Reggie would concern himself with legitimate business. They were doing a book with the writer John Pearson, which was eventually published as
A Profession of Violence.

I don’t believe that the twins would have retired – I don’t believe they
could
have. The order of London crime would have fallen to pieces, as it did after they were arrested on 8 May 1968, in a simultaneous dawn raid on members of the firm which Chris and I managed to escape.

We’d all been drinking in the Old Horns on the night of the 7th. We went from there to the Astor Club off Berkeley Square, where Albert Donaghue and Ronnie Bender tried to take a camera off a girl who was taking photographs. Everyone was enjoying themselves, and I remember saying goodnight to the twins when they left at about two in the morning, Ronnie with a boy and Reggie with a girl. Chris and I stayed on for a little drink, and then drove straight up to Birmingham. All the others who left were followed home, and when the police hit the addresses in the morning we weren’t there.

The first I knew about what had happened was when my Nicky
phoned me at about eleven that morning at the Albany Hotel in Birmingham. He said, ‘The twins have been nicked.’ They were always expecting it to happen, but nothing concerned them. Like everyone else, they thought it was just a hold – that it would be a case of holding charges or, as we called them, bow and arrow charges being made against them and then they would be freed. It had happened before. In the evening, it hit all the papers. It was national news that a number of men had been arrested, although there was nothing mentioned about murders, and half of the reports didn’t even refer to the twins by name but just called them businessmen.

At that time the police didn’t have Ronnie Hart, Albert Donaghue or the Mills brothers, so there was no undue concern on our part. The most they could have nicked us for was a couple of GBHs – grievous bodily harm. After about three weeks in Birmingham, we considered it safe to come home. I was arrested with Nicky and June McDonald, the girlfriend of Eddie Futrell, a well-known club owner, in a pub in Haggerston. We were taken to Old Street police station, held for twenty-four hours and questioned by Superintendent Harry Mooney about the murder of Jack The Hat.

He said, ‘I want to put this to you, Tony. Your brother Nicky was asked to drive a car somewhere without realising what was in it. It doesn’t mean that, because he drove the car, he will be charged with any offence.’

In other words, he was trying to nick us for driving a car with a body in it. But Nicky hadn’t even been with us at the murder scene. Mooney had got the information wrong, and it had to be Carol Skinner (Blonde Carol) who had given it to him. I’d never spoken to the woman, and she didn’t know me, but she knew Nicky: She’d mistaken me for him.