The Last Real Gangster Page 3

  ‘Whose van’s this? What’s in it?’

  Who’s it registered to? Me! They’ve got my van down the nick and I’ve got to go and get it. But, before I know it, in the morning they’re bang-bang-bang on my door. I know they’ve got two witnesses and I am fucking nicked.

  I’m not fully dressed, but down the next street there’s a bombsite where I used to leave my car. I go out the back way. They’re going, ‘Open up, it’s the police!’ and banging on the door. I’ve only got my trousers, shoes and shirt on – I never had time to put a jacket on. Maureen’s opened the door to them. They’ve come tearing in. I’m over the back garden to the next street, got to the turning with the car, but they’re right on me. I was nicked in the car as they’d surrounded the next street.

  I got some bird for that: two years, but in stages. I was in Brixton, but from there I went to the Isle of Sheppey – and then back to Brixton for six weeks on a motoring offence, driving without a licence. Later, I was wanted again for another robbery and I had to leave south London, but this time I got away. It was 1958 and I went to the East End because Charlie Kray used to come over to me. He was working over there with a big buyer, who bought lorry loads of stuff. Charlie was introduced to me and used to buy from my lock-ups.

  When I went over there on my toes, I met Charlie and his wife Dolly. They said, ‘We’ve got somewhere you can hole up. Ronnie’s got a flat in Adelina Grove,’ which is opposite The Blind Beggar. Sidney Street, where Churchill laid siege to ‘Peter the Painter’ (ringleader of a group of East European anarchists and armed thieves cornered in the East End in 1911), was at the side of it. Those flats are really expensive now; they want a fucking fortune for them. But it was like two rooms – a kitchen, and you went outside to a verandah, where the toilet was.

  It wasn’t in good nick but I had it all done up in what were modern styles then. There was a gay fella, John, who used to work on the firm for the twins. He was good at fashion and designing and he helped me do it up when I took Maureen over there. It had been a shithole, really. But Jamie (overleaf, with Buster Edwards) went to the local school round the corner. I was under the name of Freddie Puttnam, Maureen’s brother’s name, so I took his identity and I lived over there for quite a while. That’s Ronnie Kray’s legs on the right-hand side, when he was on his toes from Epsom mental hospital. It was the first time I’d met him.

  I had a nice place over in Herne Hill but I had to let it out to Ronnie King, who was an ABA champion. My Jamie was born in Million Road, Herne Hill; the doctor and the midwives delivered him in the next room. I’ve actually got a photo somewhere of Jamie just after he’s been born.

  Charlie had said, ‘Come round the house and meet my mother and the twins.’ But I wasn’t too keen because I knew their reputation: they were always beating people up at that snooker hall they had, and getting into rows and trouble. I was out to make money but they were a lot different, though they were opening up spiels then and getting into long firms.

  Eventually I went into one of their spiels. Maureen was sitting in the car outside and she said, ‘I saw the police vans come round and they all steamed out. I knew you were nicked.’ With all the other guys I was done in Harper Square for illegal gambling.

  I was in the cells and they said, ‘We’re gonna take your dabs and see if you’re wanted.’ So I’m thinking, ‘Fucking hell, I hope I can pay the fine now and get out of the nick.’ So, I’m in the dock and we’re getting silly £2 fines, but there were a lot of us. I can see these CID coppers over the side of the court. As I went to walk out, they said, ‘’Ello, Fred, we’ve been lookin’ for you. What you doin’ over ’ere?’

  So, they walked me to the car park. There were three of us; then all of a sudden there were four. I look round and there’s my George walking at the side of me.

  ‘What you gonna do, Fred?’

  He’s got a stick down his trousers and he thinks I’m going to have it away again. But the copper said to me, ‘Albert’s been round and had a word.’ This was Albert Connell, the bookmaker, who was a straightener with the coppers. He wasn’t a grass – he was a good man who got people out of lots of trouble. Maureen’s been round to see him and he’s gone into Carter Street, where they issued the warrants.

  So, I know I’ve got a bit of help and I’ve said, ‘What you doin’, George? Fuck off! Go on, everything’s all right!’

  The coppers have gone, ‘’Oo the fuckin’ ’ell’s ’e walkin’ along with us?’

  He left us and they drove me down to Carter Street. The geezer behind the desk said, ‘Do you want me to handle it? You’re gonna get a bit of time.’

  My hands are tied; you do what you have to do. He phoned up Southampton: ‘We’ve got this guy you’ve been lookin’ for, Freddie Foreman, what d’ya wanna do? It’s two years old now – are them witnesses still available? D’ya want me to deal with it or do you want me to send him down to you? I’ve got him on receiving, not the actual robbery.

  ‘All right, leave it to me.’

  ‘How’s that?’ he said to me.

  ‘Yeah, cushty, fine.’

  So I went to Wandsworth nick for six months, which was nothing. After that I got to know the twins and Charlie very well. That’s how it all started.

  When I came out, I moved on and got another firm round me: Alfie Gerard, Ronnie Everett and Mickey Regan. Older, more professional people to work with.

  I’d just come out of Wandsworth in the left-hand picture. I put Gregory in a good school when I got my pub, years later: Oakfield College in Dulwich. From there, he and Jamie went to the boarding school up on Blackheath, Christ’s College. Gregory said, ‘I’ll go there if Jamie follows me when he’s old enough.’ He’d got caught up on London Bridge with some other kids, nicking stuff off the backs of lorries, and there were no decent schools at the Elephant & Castle. I had the house at Dulwich Village – ten grand for a house there in the sixties. So I gave them the best education at the time. They’ve had no convictions and never had any trouble – they’ve never needed to, they’ve had a good life.

  We’ve got the three kids in the second photo. Jamie (left) came along about six years after Gregory, and Danielle (right) another three years later.

  There’s Buster Edwards in Cornwall with his wife June (seated), with my boys and Maureen. June was pregnant with a little girl, her first baby, but the baby died. I took the photo.

  That’s my second firm there, with our wives at a boxing dinner at the Dorchester in the very early 1960s. The only ones missing are Alf Gerard and Mickey Regan; Alf wasn’t photographed very often. There’s Ronnie Everett (tall guy on the right); ‘Dingdong Del’ Rudell (second from right), once a bookmaker in the gambling business; Lenny White (in glasses), who used to work with me when I was doing the shops; and Johnny Mason (second from left), who came on the firm with Mickey and me.

  This is Alfie Gerard and his son Nicky. People were petrified of Alf – he could be terrifying, but he had a heart of gold. He was such a lovely guy, but he wouldn’t suffer fools gladly. Things were black and white with him, there was no grey; you either accepted people or you didn’t, that was his style. But he was solid, loyal as they come.

  Alf died in Brighton in 1981; he had food poisoning. Jerry Callaghan, another member of the Foreman firm, was with him and should have taken him to hospital – his stomach was swelling up and he was ill. He died in the fucking lift going to the surgery; he should have been taken earlier, but they were on their toes as usual. That’s why he didn’t want to surface. Mind you, Alf was a terrible eater – he’d eat six pies and mash at once.

  Alf had a fish restaurant in Bermondsey called The Blue Plaice. He came out of the back one day when I went down with Maureen before they opened. I said I fancied some eels and he called out to his chef, ‘Scatty Eddie’ Watkins, who would later shoot a customs officer in 1979. He gave him a job because Eddie used to cook for him in the nick. Alf comes out with his white outfit on. He’s got a big knife in one hand and a huge conger e
el with its head hanging off, covered in blood down the front where he’s been having a carve-up.

  Maureen nearly threw up: ‘Let’s go and have some Italian!’

  ‘What’s the fuckin’ matter with ’er?’ he said.

  ‘See ya later, Alf!’

  His little boy was Gregory’s age, so they were friendly and grew up together. It was tragic what happened to young Nicky – but of course Nicky turned into a fucking villain, like his dad.

  In 1970 he killed Tony Zomparelli in a Soho arcade. Ronnie Knight (married at the time to the actress Barbara Windsor) was accused of giving him the money to do it, because Zomparelli had stabbed his brother David to death in a West End club, but he was later acquitted.

  Then Nicky had trouble with Tommy Hole Senior and Junior, some nonsense over his wife. He went out to get some booze for his kid’s birthday party in 1982, then they plotted up and shot him. He got out of the car but they were hitting him over the head with the shotguns. They made a right messy job of it.

  Years later, they were both paid back. Young Tommy Hole hanged himself in Parkhurst in 1991, then in 1999 the old man was shot at the Beckton Arms in Canning Town.

  That’s Big Georgie Cahill on the left – he had a scrap-metal yard. One of the firm, he was good at the old fizzer (burning open safes) because he could use a torch and cut up metal.

  This is Scotch Pat Connolly (left), and Henry Cooper, in 1961; Red-Faced Tommy (second from left) – ‘The Jar’, they used to call him – would sell zircon rings with snide diamonds to publicans’ wives and got a lot of money out of it; that’s Henry Cooper, obviously; Bert ‘Battles’ Rossi (right), the Italian was convicted of the slashing of Jack Spot (Jewish East End gangland leader in the pre-Krays era) in 1956, alongside Teddy Dennis, Bill Blythe, Bobby Warren and Mad Frankie Fraser. Dennis and Blythe did the cutting.

  That was when the Krays opened the gym at the Double R club. I took Buster, Ronnie King and Tommy McGovern with me. I worked with Tommy when I was on the meat market; I used to pick him up at three in the morning. That’s Sulky Gower on the right, manager of the Astor Club; next to him, Jim Wicks, the manager of Henry Cooper, me, Reggie Kray, Red-Face, Charlie and Ron Kray. We used to go down the Astor after all the boxing matches, from all the different parts of London; the twins were the East End and I was south London – they used to call it ‘Indian country’, coming over to the fucking south! They came firm-handed when they came to my pub, The Prince of Wales. The Astor was neutral territory, where we could all go.

  In front at the ringside (Page 40) are Tim Riley, editor of Boxing News, and Charlie Kray Senior (second left and centre). Next to me at the back is Buller Ward (top left), whom Reggie Kray ended up slashing because he was minding Tony Maffia. Buller wouldn’t let them in on the action so they did him in the Regency Club – Reggie was a fucking liberty-taker, but a good man.

  When I look back over it, I realise I never really liked him as a person. I didn’t trust him. Ronnie was definitely the nuttiest, because he had mental breakdowns, but he was on tranquillisers that would knock a horse over. He used to give them sometimes to people on his firm and they were out for two days. He’d giggle about it – hee-hee-hee! I liked Ronnie, but I always felt Reggie sat on the fence and would go whatever way suited him.

  I once had a little fallout upstairs in their house with the Nash brothers (Islington-born-and-bred family firm, whose reputation predated that of the Krays, with whom they shared a cautious respect). It could have got nasty because I was on my own and he had his brothers there – Roy, Billy John, George and Jimmy, who was the more dangerous of them. ‘It’s gonna go off ’ere, they are gonna have a go at me,’ I thought. It was only Ronnie Kray and Jimmy Nash who talked sense and calmed the situation down. Reggie never took my side. I thought, ‘You ain’t said a word, you would’ve let it happen. If Ronnie hadn’t have been there they’d have set about me.’ And that would have been a big mistake.

  But Ronnie was all right, and so was Jimmy – it turned out that I saved Jimmy Nash and Joey Pyle from getting topped for the Pen Club shooting, in 1960 (in Duval Street, off Spitalfields Market; the club’s name alluded to its funding by a robbery at the Parker Pen factory). It was Jimmy who actually shot the barman, Selwyn Cooney. At the time, the club was being run by Jerry Callaghan and Billy Ambrose, who were on my firm – they were at the ‘Battle of Bow’ with me the next year; we were close. In fact, I later saved both of them from being arrested.

  I had a meet with the twins and Bill at the Krays’ house in Vallance Road, Bethnal Green. Jimmy Nash was charged with the murder of Cooney, as was Joey Pyle from south London. We sat down and said, ‘Let’s work this out. Who’s the main witness for the Prosecution?’ Bill had been shot in the stomach as well that day, but he’d said nothing. But Fay Sadler – ‘the Kiss of Death’, who’d had three boyfriends who all died – was having it with Cooney. One of the witnesses was pregnant – we got her over to Ireland, got her to change her story. All the other witnesses rewrote their statements so they couldn’t identify anyone who actually fired a shot.

  Jimmy Nash was making little cotton nooses with Joey Pyle when they were in HM Prison, Brixton. He was a little nutty, but, if they’d been found guilty they’d have been topped, no question about it. But the judge said, ‘Well, it looks like Mr Cooney stepped in the way of a passing bullet.’ They all walked out.

  Fucking amazing!

  Then there’s Albert Donoghue (top, fourth from left), who’d be chief prosecution witness in the Frank Mitchell case; he rolled over. And that’s ‘The Duke’, Dukie Osbourne, next to him on the right, who was later wanted over the shooting of a customs guy in 1979.

  When his partner Scatty Eddie Watkins’s lorry full of cannabis was surrounded by customs, they phoned me to either find them a safe house or alternatively to help them to cut the puff that they had hidden out of the floors and walls of the container they had. I therefore got myself involved in a very bad situation – one which went terribly wrong for everyone involved. Especially the poor customs officer who was shot dead by Scatty Eddie.

  Dukie committed suicide in a flat on Hackney Marshes shortly after; they laid him out on a football pitch. I’d had a passport made for him to come to America with me. He had a moustache; suited and booted, looked like a military guy – because he went a bit hippie after this photo, mixing with all the drugs crowd. Christine Keeler and all the titled people were puffing away, everyone was at it, but I’ve never smoked in my life. Dukie had done a twelve-stretch in prison before he killed himself; couldn’t face going back.

  Most of these people above were on the Kray firm. The two barmen at the Double R club were Cliffy Anderson and John Doyland, the gay fella who did up my flat for me. I nicked the pair of them off the twins when I had The Prince of Wales at Lant Street in the Borough – the street where Charles Dickens lived when his father was in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. I had the lock off Dickens’s door in a frame on the pub wall, but that went missing somehow. John and Cliff were well pleased to come and work with me. The twins didn’t like it, but I wasn’t worried about them. They were the two best barmen they had, really fucking good at their job.

  This is Jerry Callaghan (right), who was at the Pen Club shooting; he was one of my firm.I was a professional thief, but Ronnie and Reggie never nicked a car – they didn’t even know how to drive a fucking car! They were using strong-arm to get into clubs and pubs; they were into protection money. Then they got into the long firm – when they’d build up the credit, run out the back door and sell it all. But they were also doing some business with Eddie Pucci (below second from left – with the twins and Charlie Kray), who came over as Frank Sinatra Junior’s Mafia minder when he appeared at the Rainbow Rooms in 1963. Pucci was later shot dead on a golf course in Chicago by the Mafia.

  Charlie and me used to go high-society gambling with Billy Hill (the nearest thing in London to a godfather figure in the late forties and fifties). He had these chemin-de-fer clubs for
lords and ladies in Knightsbridge and Kensington. They were all illegal, but they used to set them up – you never knew the address where it was going to be held till the last minute. They’d have a buffet table laid out with smoked salmon and all that gear. Charlie and me were there as minders every couple of weeks and we’d go home with a couple of hundred quid – terrific! Red-Faced Tommy used to come in with a deck of cards. Billy Hill and Gypsy, his wife, used to read the cards from his crooked set. They cleaned up with the lords and ladies.

  I was there when the twins bought a gambling club in Knightsbridge, Esmeralda’s Barn, for two grand. Stefan De Faye was running the booze behind the bar and he used to give me all the drink he got hold of when he was working at this big hotel. All the high rollers used to go there and he would put it on their bill – all these bottles of wine and cigars, they were his little earner when their bill went in. He used to come over with cases of Scotch and Camus brandy; he was educating me in all the different German wines, the Niersteiners and Mosels and that. Stefan was a lovely man; he used to do the Café Continental TV programme: ‘Welcome to the Café Continental!’ It was all juggling and tightrope acts, and cabaret. Word was that the little French singer on there was fucking a very well-known person in the highest government circles!

  My mate Mickey Regan (overleaf left, with his wife Chrissie) died in Brighton a few years ago, bless him. He was from a very respected family; the Regans were rivals to the Nashes – they were even born in the same fucking square in Islington. Their fathers knew each other, but Mick had a bit of a falling-out with the Nashes. I went over and gave him some support. Mick was a good businessman; he had an SP (bookmaker’s) office at the Angel over the ChiChi Club. Mick’s brother Larry worked for him and his cousin Danny Regan, who was a face.