The Last Real Gangster Page 6

  That’s Maureen, Ronnie and me with George Raft when I had The Prince of Wales, but that was later on in the 1960s. Like James Cagney, New York-born movie actor Raft was originally a song-and-dance man before becoming associated with gangster roles – most notably in support to Paul Muni in the original classic film version of Scarface (1932). When they brought all the gaming machines over, I was the first customer of the American Gabe Foreman (same name as mine) for the one-armed bandits. They were illegal then, but we put them in all the little cafés and drinkers. Frankie Fraser and Eddie Richardson got into it as well, but we were the first. They were our rivals; they had a place in Wardour Street.

  When I opened a casino in the early 1960s, the 211 Club in Balham, George Raft came over for the opening. The Nashes, the twins and I had been drawing money out of George’s Colony Club. That was how it worked, like in New York – you had to have the three firms, who all got their bit out of anything.

  George was respected as an actor; he’d made loads of films. But that night I asked him: ‘Who was the main man who gave you help, George?’ He said it was a Yorkshireman, Owney Madden. He was the one who went to America and opened the Cotton Club. (They made a film about it, with Bob Hoskins playing him, and his mate Frenchie was Fred Gwynne from The Munsters.) Madden got Carnera the boxer over from Italy; he got Mae West and put her in shows. The big musicals were on Broadway but the Cotton Club was in Harlem, with all the top bands there – black musicians who had to come in the back door, as that was the way it was run then. ‘I rode shotgun with him when he used to take the booze down to different places [in the twenties],’ said George. He was walking across the pavement when a rival gang opened up on them and shot two guys; he was right there in the thick of it.

  The twins wound up with some American people who were wrong ’uns – they were slipped into them. When they opened the Colony Club, Meyer Lansky (the Mafia’s Jewish financier) was behind it. George Raft was just the frontman, the meeter and greeter. It was run by Lansky’s firm: Dino and Eddie Cellini, the two brothers who are mentioned by Hyman Roth (Mario Puzo’s fictionalised version of Lansky) as Dino and Eddie Pennino in The Godfather: PartII (1974) – ‘I’ll have them running the casino’ – when it’s his birthday and he’s cutting the cake. They were real people; they used to run Lansky’s casinos. I would go over and meet Dino. We used to walk round the street and he’d give me the envelope, for the twins and me, and the Nashes. We were copping a bit of money. We’d get it one time, the Nashes would draw it another – so we knew what they were fucking getting!

  The twins were the worst trouble because they kept going down the Colony Club, taking fucking ugly people with scars down their faces and ruining the gaff. So, to keep their licence going, they put an ex-Old Bill on the door. He was photographing everyone coming in and out, getting them to sign the register. I met Dino outside: ‘We’ve got to stop them coming down, Fred, bringing all these fucking villains down here! We’re here to keep ’em out!’

  Sinatra had been down there and they wanted to meet him and all the Hollywood actors. They wanted to be up the front, they couldn’t keep away. I was trying to keep a low profile and go legitimate with the betting shops, the casino and the clubs, kids in boarding schools; I was trying to be a straight-goer.

  The Krays did help some people, but they were strong-arming most. They didn’t do a lot of good as far as I knew. I don’t know of anyone who really benefited from knowing them. They were always bleeding people, really – in the clubs and bars they took over.

  The other sidelines I had with my old firm were big, heavy bits of work but nobody knew it was us who was doing it; we kept very shtum about it all. We never started splashing our money around. The twins were the only ones who got my photograph taken with different people. We were getting invited out to all these dinners – bowtie, dressed up. Of course the women loved it, but we didn’t want to go. They were getting us involved in these sorts of things, which was our downfall, really: being associated with them all. We should have kept ourselves to ourselves, low-profile.

  Ronnie Kray went over to New York in April 1968, the month before the twins got nicked, but it was the Yanks who took him there – the undercover-copper grasses. They were showing him where the St Valentine’s Day Massacre took place – which made them look like cunts, as it was in Chicago!

  We raised a load of money up the river for the British Olympic Boxing Team to go to Mexico in ’68, because otherwise we wouldn’t have been represented in a lot of divisions – which was a liberty, really. Mickey Regan and I were going out there. That’s John H. Stracey on the left, the Olympic champion, and Johnny Cheshire to my left, who was around me quite a lot down the pub and the 211 Club. Nicky Carter, on the end, wound up with his own company in the City. I had tickets to go to the Olympics but couldn’t do it – I’d got fucking nicked with the twins! But Mickey went and while he was out there he got Montezuma’s revenge. He wound up in the hospital with food poisoning and nearly died.

  After the Colony Club, the twins fucked up everything that they touched: the casino in Knightsbridge; getting mixed up with politicians – they’ve put an additional thirty-year notice on some of the evidence surrounding that because it’s too fucking hot. With the Lord Boothby business – and more on that later.

  Ronnie didn’t hide the fact that he was what he was. He came over to my pub: ‘Ooh, I like these little bank robbers you got over ’ere!’

  ‘Now, don’t you fuckin’ start all that!’ I said.

  I couldn’t believe what he was saying; I thought it was a joke. But the twins used to argue like two fucking women: ‘You bitch!’, ‘You slag!’ You don’t call a man a ‘slag’ – or at least you didn’t in those days.

  All the firm used to call them ‘Gert and Daisy’, or ‘the Brothers Grim’. But they were vicious and evil, wicked bastards. They were in their own fucking world that they couldn’t see out of, and they thought they were something special. There was nothing special about them, but they met Sinatra’s son, Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, Billy Daniels – all these American people. They were becoming famous and believing their own hype.

  The Twins had these parties where everyone was constantly going off to the bedrooms. It was all too much for me. I couldn’t get out of there quick enough!

  They were all off in the bedrooms, having their nonsense. Dingdong Del and I seemed like the only straightgoers there. I said to him, ‘This is not for me!’

  Frankie Warren, the promoter’s father, was there that night, too. He said to me in the toilet, ‘What the fuckin’ ’ell’s goin’ on ’ere?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it, would you?’ I said.

  Priests and politicians, it’s a different world out there. They’re just dealing with it now: I knew a girl who worked in the Home Secretary’s office and she said one of them was a paedophile. This was back when I had the pub. I said, ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t wanna know.’ But it won’t die; it keeps raising its ugly head.

  The reason the Krays killed Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie in 1967 was that they wanted him to go and kill Leslie Payne. (Payne was the Krays’ financial adviser, who introduced them to long-firm fraud. He became their enemy after removing himself from the Kray firm.) But he never did it, because the place where Payne lived was security-controlled. So, he’s taken money for it and he’s done the money on booze and drugs: ‘You’re off the fucking firm now. Fuck off, Jack!’

  Sometime later they meet him; they’ve made a decision to take him back. But, before they told him he could come back, he’s got a little team round him and he’s running around saying, ‘I’m gonna do the twins!’ He even mentioned it to me at one stage.

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Jack,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m not fuckin’ frightened of them. I’ll fuckin’ shoot ’em!’

  Then he’s at my club in Balham. I get called out and he’s having it out with the croupier – but, before I get there, he throws his knife under a table, where a couple a
re sitting. It was a Scottish boxer and his wife, having a drink and something to eat from our free buffet.

  I said, ‘Come on, Jack, get out! I wanna speak to you.’

  ‘What, and get a bullet in the ’ead, like Ginger Marks?’

  ‘Never mind about that. I’m goin’ downstairs to have a light ale. I’ll give you ten minutes and, when I come back, I wanna see you gone. Get out of ’ere and don’t come back again!’

  He’d pulled his knife on the croupier because he’d done his money, he thought he’d been robbed. The people with him were a little crew from over Notting Hill. They were all round the table, gambling: ‘Come on, Jack, you better go.’

  ‘I ain’t fuckin’ goin’ …’

  ‘You’d better go ’cos it’s serious, you’ll get ’urt. We don’t want no trouble ’ere …’

  They talked him out of it, the bastard!

  So this gets around and everyone is saying he misbehaved at the 211 Club. Ronnie Kray gets to hear of it and he’s going off. So this is going on behind the scenes and then Jack goes to the Regency Jazz Club (a popular venue in Stoke Newington, where he lived), but I didn’t find this out until twenty fucking years later!

  Bertie Summers and another guy were on the door; Bertie later met me in my Gregory’s pub, The Punchbowl, and wrote on a piece of paper exactly what happened that night. Jack came to the door; he was drunk and they wouldn’t let him in. Under his coat he had a sawn-off; there was a bit of a scuffle on the door.

  ‘Any of them Krays in there? I’m gonna fuckin’ shoot ’em! Any of the firm in there?’ he said.

  He was going to shoot someone. They struggled with him. The gun went off and blew a fucking hole in the door!

  Well, Reggie Kray was in there – he was sitting at the end of the bar, rotten drunk. This was after his wife Frances had died and he was drinking himself into a stupor. If Jack had gone in there he’d have shot Reggie, that’s for sure. But they forced him out and got the gun off him. They put the gun in the cloakroom.

  Reggie came down and said, ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘Some drunk tryin’ to gatecrash.’

  They hushed it all up, didn’t say it was Jack at all.

  FRANK: Reggie (above, with Freddie, Charlie, Henry Cooper and his manager) wasn’t ‘the man’; he seemed to be more and more in thrall to Ronnie. He was taking a lot of purple hearts. That’s why he got involved with McVitie, who was always taking them, and that’s why McVitie was saying silly things. Not only that but he was drinking more. He was going out drinking with Tommy Cowley at the nightclub where Nosher Powell used to be the doorman. I heard him shouting there one night. I don’t know what was happening, but some people were ducking him by then.

  FREDDIE: Reggie went away, satisfied, but word got around. So, they got him on the phone and said, ‘Come back, Jack, we got some work for you to do.’

  But he turned round in front of the two of them and said, ‘You’ve only got me back on the firm because I come out to shoot you the other night!’

  Reggie and Ronnie looked at each other as if to say, are you fucking sure? Now they know what happened on the door: Reggie would have been a goner.

  So, of course now they’re plotting to do him. They got Tony and Chrissie Lambrianou to bring him to a party, but what cunts they were! They had a roomful of people, young girls and young boys! I think they intended to batter him and really hurt him, but not to kill him. Still, they did say, ‘Bring the gun.’ But all the guns they had were from the Yanks, and they were fucking useless. That geezer was giving them all duds! (The mysterious American Alan Bruce Cooper was the Krays’ armourer by this point.)

  Knowing Ronnie, I reckon he might have gone through with it, but now they were going to batter McVitie. They had a screaming match with him first of all. Then Ronnie smashed a glass in his face.

  Jack’s taken his coat off to have a fight with them; he’s got a silk-lined waistcoat on. One witness statement said Reggie was pushing a knife in and it was bending in the silk lining, so it wasn’t going in. Then the other witnesses were saying he went out the room and they told him to fuck off, but he came back in to have a fight with them.

  Jack was that type of fella, all pilled up. He could have walked out of the room that night, but instead he came back in to have a row. Because he could have a fight, Jack, he could walk on his hands around the room – he was strong, with powerful shoulders. In that Krays film (1990), he was a frail little weakling, but he was fitter and stronger than they were. He had no fat on him and he was on amphetamines all the time.

  But there was no premeditation among the people who brought him, the Lambrianous and Ronnie Bender. Bender was silly because he got the knife from the kitchen for Reggie – that’s why he got twenty years, whereas Tony and Chrissie got fifteen. Bender joined in the fight with Jack as well; even two little croupiers were having it in the fight until it got really serious. That’s when they realised it had got out of hand. They reproduced their statements in Martin Fido’s book, The Krays: Unfinished Business, which confirmed that the twins didn’t really want to kill him that night.

  They tore Ronnie Hart (the Krays’ cousin) to pieces in the witness box because it wasn’t him who came over to me: it was that little bastard who ran with them, Tommy Cowley. He was the one who came with Charlie.

  Lant Street was right off the Borough and there on the corner was my pub. Hart said they parked on the corner and he saw Charlie go round to me; I opened the window up and looked out; I opened the door and let him in – for him to tell me they’d dropped Jack McVitie’s body down in Bermondsey, the other side of the Borough.

  They put it on my plate. They were supposed to go round Cazenove Road, near where Jack the Hat was murdered, and throw the body onto the railway track – that’s what Ronnie Kray told them to do. But instead of that they drove him from Stoke Newington, through Dalston and Bethnal Green, right down through the Rotherhithe Tunnel via Commercial Road, out through the tunnel, and dropped him right round the corner from my pub!

  How they did it at two or three in the morning and got away with it, I don’t know. They just dumped him outside this church, where there had been a wedding the previous weekend.

  The Krays went mad when they found out what they’d done. That’s when they knocked up Charlie and got him out of bed to come over to tell me.

  Hart couldn’t possibly have seen this happen from where he said he was. He said I’d put my head out of a window, which was screwed down, where it was used as a broom cupboard. He knocked on the door of the pub, which never had a knocker on it (it had a bell at the top, which you had to stand on the step to reach). There were so many discrepancies. It was impossible, given the map of it all, for him to see round corners. Where he said he’d parked was too far back, so all his evidence was fucked.

  But they accepted his evidence, and then Harry Hopwood came in afterwards and said that, after the murder, Reggie Kray went back to his flat with a cut hand. They bandaged his hand up and then Hart fell asleep on the settee. He stayed there all night and didn’t get up till the morning – and yet he’s supposed to be coming over to my pub.

  It was that little bastard Cowley – and they got the information out of him because he walked out of the case and got about six months. So he definitely rolled over and helped them, without a doubt. I never saw him again.

  Bender made a statement as well, about bringing the body over and leaving it there. But they’re all in the nick with me, making out that they’re shtum and have said nothing. All three of them had made statements, and it didn’t come out until all those years later when it came into the public domain. Fido got it from the Home Office. If they’d have produced that evidence, it wouldn’t have been a premeditated murder: it would have been a row at a party that went wrong. But they never produced the prosecution statements, which was wrong. They should have given it to the defence counsel – that’s how the Guildford Four would get out, because the prosecution never produced their statements.


  And the fucking forensic evidence was laughable! The forensics officer said they dragged the canal, but got to a bridge and couldn’t move because the council had put bollards there. But the firm went down there and threw the gun and the knife, wrapped in a tea towel, into the canal.

  The divers go down there and come up with a gun with a hollow wooden barrel. It had a faulty mechanism. If that gun had been in there for the eighteen months since the crime was committed, it’d been in there twenty years and eighteenmonths! Someone must have thrown it away after the Second World War. It had disintegrated, whereas the gun would have been in one piece and the butt would still have been intact.

  The things the prosecution got away with were unbelievable. The trial was a farce from start to finish. I was amazed at the evidence they were bringing against me from this bloody Hart. I knew he hadn’t been there and it was completely false. Okay, the rest of it was true, but how did they fucking know this? It had to have come from Tommy Cowley, who ended up in Brixton Prison with Charlie. Reggie, Ron, myself and all the others were put into Wandsworth. Simply put, Cowley was a spy for the police.

  As for Jack, he got a burial at sea.

  Later, they even tried to put Lord Lucan down to me! John Pearson said he left his car at Newhaven and that was the last they saw of him. He left ten grand behind to pay off these criminals to get him out of the country, and he left across the Channel. But supposedly he was shot, and Pearson referred to this little ‘facility’ of Freddie Foreman’s in The Times. There was a picture of me and everything, trying to put it on my plate!