The Last Real Gangster Read online

  ‘I don’t fuckin’ like ’em!’

  He put the phone down.

  Next thing he’s sending flowers to my wife, apologising: ‘Sorry for what I said.’

  But they needed me; I didn’t need them. I used to get a lot of grief from Ronnie but it was the illness that did it. And Reggie had a bit of an illness – after thirty years it can’t do your bloody brain any good.

  FREDDIE: In Broadmoor, Ronnie did a painting of a cottage with a picket fence and a pathway – and a black sun. It was psychological. He dreamed of a white cottage home with a picket fence, but there’s no sunshine.

  FRANK: When Ronnie fell out with anyone, everybody was a slag: ‘You slaaag!’ I once went on a meet with Ronnie at Broadmoor and he said, ‘What’s that fuckingslag doing?’ This fella Pete Gillette had been sleeping with Reggie in prison, got out, and ended up with Ronnie’s wife, Kate Kray.

  But, really, I used to feel sorry for them when I drove away. I don’t know how they did their time.

  Ronnie wanted Lambrianou killed before he died. There were stories going round that either he’d slagged Kate Kray off or they’d found out he’d made a statement later on. Ronnie was going on about this, but then he died.

  A lot of people got in to Ronnie’s funeral that shouldn’t have, I don’t know how. But it was a well-attended funeral. It was a lot better than Reggie’s – that wasn’t as big. Around the coffin at St Matthew’s Church, Bethnal Green, are Charlie, Reggie, Johnny Nash, Freddie in the corner (second from right) and Ginger Dennis with his back to us. (Dennis was the one who slashed Jack Spot.)

  On Bethnal Green Road it was just as if royalty had died; you couldn’t move. We went just out of London to Chingford cemetery, but it took us an hour to get there. Everything was stop-stop-stop. I had a good talk with Steven Berkoff, the actor who played George Cornell, who got shot in the pub. Freddie was there, with his son Jamie.

  I’m standing on the left of Reggie, who you can see in profile talking to my wife, Noelle (left). Les Berman was on the Kray firm – I think he worked as a market trader. That’s him with his back to us in the green mac. Facing him to the right is Lambrianou. The guy with the beard on the right is a prison warder. Flanagan, with her back to us in the blue dress, was a hairdresser to Mrs Kray and also the first Page 3 girl.

  I couldn’t have done his time; I’d have ended it. All the shit you’re in with, you can’t pick the people you’re stuck with for years. On the outside you wouldn’t give them the time of day, never mind talk to them! How he got through it, I don’t know.

  Reggie had a few affairs in there. He had a gash on his eye from when a young bloke he was sharing a cell with threw a pot at him during a lover’s tiff.

  I used to get him some spliff. I had to spend about fifty quid on a big lump that was shaped like a cigar in plastic, so it could go up his arse. I used to take it to the nick but I would not take it in – I’d pass it to someone and, if they got caught, it was up to them.

  On the mainland I saw him in every prison you could go to, right to the end. He used to ring me up because I had cancer at the time. I’d started chemotherapy in ’97 and I was just getting over mine.

  The authorities knew he had cancer but they weren’t treating him, they were giving him Gaviscon. That was all they were giving him in the nick. It was a terrible death that he had. In that TV programme that they did, The Krays: The Final Word, he was drinking whisky and morphine. I lived every second of it because I was like that when I had it bad.

  I lost all my hair. I had mine for four years but now I was putting weight on – he used to ring me up and I’d say, ‘Reggie, I can’t tell you because it’s a different type of cancer.’ Mine was lymphoma and his was different altogether. (Reggie was suffering from cancer of the bladder and bowel, which eventually spread to much of his body.) So, I wrote a letter to the governor and we got a lot of people to write to the British Government.

  The next thing is he’s in hospital and they’ve set him free. The Government were trying to look nice, but they killed him off. He might have lived another year if they’d looked after him, but it was horrible what they did: he was in a cell without home comforts. I had my wife looking after me; I used to have my pet dogs around me. He was in a cell on his own – with nobody to cuddle, to kiss, to cry to … because you cry a lot.

  I’m not excusing what he did in his life but he had a rough time, the poor sod. I’ve got a record, Tom Jones’s ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’ – I put it on sometimes and I cry when it says, ‘I was only dreaming’; he was still in prison.

  I always think of Reggie.

  I went to the hospital on the day Reggie was dying, at Norwich. Bradley Allardyce (Reggie’s gay prison lover in his later years, younger than him by decades) kept coming in and out. Serving nine years for armed robbery at the time, Allardyce has now been sentenced to life for murder.

  ‘Can you tell ’im to fuck off when I’m talkin’?’ I said.

  He kept coming in to where Reggie was in bed, from a hallway in another part of the hospital. He’s got newspaper people he’s giving a story to, and photographs of Reggie. I told Reggie this just before he died.

  ‘What are you fuckin’ makin’ excuses for this cunt for?’

  He knew all the wrong people and they all abused him. At the end of the day Reg followed his true nature by being bisexual. Geoff Allan said to me, ‘His fuckin’ melon’s gone!’ (he called his head a ‘melon’). He wasn’t like the man I used to know, but that’s what the nick must have done to him.

  Freddie went there to speak to him and hold his hand on the day, 1 October 2000, with Joey Pyle and one of the Nashes.

  FREDDIE: Reggie Kray died in my arms. The wife (crime fiction novelist Roberta Kray, née Jones) fucked off out of the room, as did Allardyce, that poofy bastard Reggie was having it with. Him and her had been sitting on the edge of the bed. We’d been in there a couple of minutes, talking to Reggie – me, Johnny Nash, Joey Pyle and Wilf Pine.

  We’d bought tickets to go to Norwich and she kept blocking us. Each time she knocked us back. Wilf said, ‘We’ve gotta get down there, he ain’t gonna last much longer.’ So we sort of gatecrashed – she didn’t want us there at all.

  ‘Wipe his lips – his lips are dry and he’s trying to talk,’ Johnny said.

  ‘I know how to look after him!’

  She went right on the turn. The next thing you know, she and this Bradley have got up and walked out the room.

  So, I went and took her place, where she’d been sitting on the side of the bed. He was trying to make a conversation.

  ‘You ’ad a place up the road from ’ere – you’re back on the old turf,’ I said.

  Which it was, they had a house in East Anglia.

  He was saying, ‘’Ow did ya get down? ’Ow’s Jamie?’

  Then all of a sudden the doctor came in: ‘I need to see the patient, I’ve got to give him an injection.’

  ‘Don’t go, don’t go!’ Reggie pleaded.

  ‘We’ll go in the bar an’ ’ave a drink,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll see ya later. Don’t go, though!’

  The doctor gave him his jab. When we go back up again, he’s unconscious – he’s gone. One minute he was talking rationally, the next he was non compos mentis, right out of the game.

  So, I sat there and he was still trying to talk. I suppose he must have had his five jabs and the sixth one does you – that’s what they reckon with morphine. You could see he wasn’t going to come out of it. It was a terrible thing – he’d gone down to a skeleton by now.

  He came round again; he looked at me and he tried to talk.

  ‘Don’t fight it, Reg, let it go! I’ll see you another time and another place, mate,’ I said.

  I was trying to comfort him, holding him round the shoulders at one stage. He was silent for a little while. Wilf, Johnny and Joe were all standing by the bed.

  All of a sudden he went, ‘Uhh!’ – and they all fucking jumped!


  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ I said.

  But that was his last breath, the finale: he was finished.

  Of course she came back in, and the doctors. We went downstairs and when we came out, all the press were waiting outside. I made a couple of comments and came back home.

  She hated it. But how could a woman fall in love with Reggie Kray? He was homosexual anyway, and he was the most unlovable person you could ever fucking meet!

  I’d spent time with him in Maidstone, when Ronnie died, consoling him – the screws came and got me because he was in another wing from me.

  ‘Would you go over and keep him company because of the bad news he’s had?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  So, I went over and stayed with him all day – it was St Patrick’s Day, all the hooch that the cons had made was coming in, coloured green.

  He had a little cry, talking about Ronnie, but you couldn’t get close to him.

  And then all the wife was doing was making trouble for everybody over the funeral. I couldn’t go to it – I was in Horseferry Road, being interviewed by the fucking murder squad over Ginger Marks, more than thirty-five years after it all happened. And they wanted to know who was shot on the Battle of Bow – because Dighton, the guard who fired the shots, was worried he’d killed someone.

  ‘No, tell him not to worry,’ I said.

  FRANK: There were a lot of people at Reggie’s funeral but those who should have been in the church weren’t there. The wife didn’t want them there; she didn’t want them carrying the coffin. Roberta organised it all, even down to the pall-bearers, and she didn’t want any of the old firm there. It definitely wouldn’t have been what Reggie wanted. Whereas Dave Courtney – who’s a smashing lad, plenty of chutzpah and bottle, good sense of humour – was the head man when Ronnie died, she got another one and it was a bit of a mess.

  Half of the people didn’t even turn up. She wanted Reggie to die as a nice reformed gangster but he wasn’t like that – just a few months before he died, he wanted somebody killed.

  It was a fella called Gillette who Reggie was having an affair with. Reggie’s slagging Gillette off and he says, ‘Come down and visit me – I want ’im done.’

  But I said, ‘I’ll have to pay for what’s got to be done – have you got any money left?’

  ‘I’ve got fifteen grand left.’

  I had it all set up – I was going to get Gillette a tanning. I wasn’t going to kill him, but the money didn’t come forward and Reggie half-backed off.

  It was going to take me a week to get him into the right place where we’d do what we were going to do. But it died a death – and that was just before he died! So don’t try to make out, ‘He’s got God in his life.’ He did have God in his life. He had to lean on somebody so he leant on God, but he still had all that devilment in him.

  PART THREE

  THE LAST GANGSTER BY FREDDIE FOREMAN

  We were at Table 4 in Wormwood Scrubs when I was doing my ten-stretch on the McVitie charge. There was a television right there in front of us, and one at the other end of the wing behind us. There were three hundred prisoners in there.

  We ran the fucking wing; we kept it nice and sensible, we had our screws straightened and bringing in booze for us. We had a little scam with Gordon Goody going over to have his back massaged by this woman – she was a therapist. He had this poacher’s jacket made with all these pockets. When he’d come back, they’d search him but in the pockets were all these steaks and pork chops with the kidney in them.

  While he’s having his massage behind a screen, all these other people are waiting their turn, the screws sitting there with them. We were all Cat-A’d up; I was double Cat-A. We worked in the laundry together – the best job in the fucking nick: you haven’t got to go out in all weathers.

  Jimmy Hussey was the chairman of the film club and we’d select the films we wanted to see every week. So we lived all right; we survived it all.

  We used to get a bit of mescaline in and trip out on a Friday night, because it was the only nick in the country that banged you up at half past five of a Friday and didn’t open up till the following morning. The governor said this was the time you could write your letters home to your families; that was what the idea was, so the screws could get away and have an early night. It was a very good scam, really! But, when I was in Leicester, the special units went on hunger strike because of the conditions we were living under: sleep deprivation. Every fifteen minutes they were checking you out in your cell, banging on the door if you didn’t show your hands and your face. They were switching your light on and off, too. Then they went to the next cell and unlocked the bolts on the door. You couldn’t have any sleep at all!

  Then, on your visits, you’d have your visitors and your kids at one end, you at the other, and a screw with a notepad taking down everything you fucking said. The visits were terrible. We had to change into sterile clothing before we had one; they put metal detectors all over the visitors. If you put someone on your visitors’ list they went to their employers and checked them out. The security was fucking ridiculous!

  They called Leicester prison ‘the Submarine’ because it was so claustrophobic. They put a false ceiling in the cells; daylight couldn’t come through the windows because there were so many fucking bars, as there had been an escape attempt. The exercise yard was just a cage as you went through a tunnel; one door opened and the other one didn’t – just like on the Security Express robbery. The conditions were so bad we all went on hunger strike; I ate nothing for twelve days, just had water. I could see my fucking ribs – I hadn’t seen them since I was about sixteen! I was so pleased when it was over. They changed our conditions; we tidied up the Cat-A system a lot, made it more liberal.

  I’d just got out of my ten. Jimmy Hussey and I (that’s him sitting on the right, with fellow Train Robber Gordon Goody on the left – they hadn’t been home long, either) were opening up the Charlie Chaplin Club in Wardour Street, Soho.

  It was all a bit hush-hush when we were taking it over; we’d been building up a nice clientele and having late drinking. We had a restaurant there, with some nice grub and a couple of girls. Maureen was behind the counter, with Jimmy’s wife, Jilly. Maureen had the experience of serving in my pub.

  It’s going along lovely, but I’m going in there early one morning and I look at the placards on the pavement: ‘TRAIN ROBBER OPENS SOHO NIGHTCLUB’. Jimmy Hussey’s done an interview with the press.

  Now, West End Central made themselves busy: if you were a minute over time you were fucking nicked, you’d lose your licence. They really put the pressure on us.

  It was ridiculous because I was taking all the customers from the A&R Club late at night when they finished, when Mickey Regan and Ronnie Knight were running it in Charing Cross Road. I used to look after it when they had holidays; I’d run the club for them. They used to shut bang on time, but we would be there all night.

  But the Charlie Chaplin Club was tucked away in an alleyway, a little court off Wardour Street. Upstairs was a walk-in bar and the club was downstairs. It was doing well, but the next thing you know we had all the headaches with the Old Bill and it just went downhill. Folded.

  This is at a party at my house in Dulwich, in the early eighties. That’s Freddie Puttnam, my brother-in-law, on the left. Next to him is Stevie Ellison; he was a good little fighter whose parents lived next door to me. Those are the Hennessy brothers, Richard and Peter, on the right. But Peter got murdered: Paddy Onions stabbed him in the back at a boxing do. In return, Onions got shot outside his wine bar afterwards. Mickey Hennessy, the third brother, was shot in the neck because he was the danger man. Once his brother was killed, they tried to kill him as well, but he survived it.

  Here, I’m going to Ronnie Knight’s wedding in Marbella, Spain, in June 1987. In the documentary Britain’s GreatestRobberies on the Crime & Investigation channel it’s got this footage of my Jamie and me walking to the wedding. It has the Bank of America rob
bery and the Brinks-MAT; the Security Express (which I was involved with) was on first – but I’m in it all the fucking way through! They’ve got family footage of when Gregory and Jamie were little kids, running around when I took them on holiday. I don’t know where they got it – someone must have sold it on to them.

  Here’s Charlie Wilson (right), the Great Train Robber who was shot dead in 1990. I was in Brixton prison at the time. A lowlife who goes under the name Joe Flynn was interviewed and said I’d put a contract on Charlie over a drug deal. They tried to involve me again, but what Charlie was up to was nothing to do with me at all. Roy Adkins in Amsterdam was the one who put the contract on him, over Adkins’s name coming up. He was on his toes in Amsterdam and got Danny Roff from south London, who Charlie knew, to go and do it. Charlie’s wife Pat let him in: ‘Oh, he’s out on the porch.’ He just fucking walked round and shot Charlie, the bastard!

  Of course, Roff got shot afterwards and crippled up. Later, when he was getting out of his wheelchair into his Mercedes, they shot him and finished the job. He didn’t survive much longer; nor did Adkins.

  My Georgie (centre) was shot with a shotgun in 1964 and Jimmy Allen (left) was murdered. He had his brain smashed in with a crowbar when he was asleep, in 1986. Jimmy had scrap-metal yards – we used to get acetylene bottles off him for cutting open safes and he’d dispose of motors if we wanted one cut up. He was a lovely guy; he used to love looking at engines and motors down at Puerto Banús on the boats. He’d talk to the captains: ‘You’re burning too much oil there,’ he’d say, looking at the exhaust coming out of the ship. He was really knowledgeable. His yards sold for 600 grand; the council were buying them all up.