The Last Real Gangster Read online

  Pat Butler is left and Pat Aucott centre. Billy Webb took the photo – he did a good book (Running with the Krays, 1995), but there’s a lot of shit in it! He wrote that Ronnie killed George Cornell because Cornell once battered him in a club in the East End. That never happened. Webb was a big bull of a man, with a huge scar on his face. They battered him in a pub once, but he went on the run with them from the Army.

  I did a book of twenty photos of the twins, a big leather-bound album, about 8 inches by 12. There’s a good one of them with baby Patsy Kensit (Reggie’s holding the baby) – they were friends with her dad, Jimmy.

  This is the twins with their pal George Osbourne (overleaf, left), from the earliest days of the firm. Another friend stands between the two of them (Ronnie is cropped off to the right). They blagged a fella for money in Swiss Cottage – he got three years and Reggie got two for demanding money with menaces. That was when they had Esmeralda’s Barn. Ozzy used to own Le Monde club – he was to die after going swimming on Brighton Beach and choking on his own vomit.

  Ronnie Kray (overleaf) on holiday in the South of France in the late 1950s. He looks very slim here. What he’d later do was drink about ten to twenty bottles of brown ale a night, and he shouldn’t have. But I always thought that nobody seemed to eat well. When I used to go out when I was young, I liked to have a meal and a few beers, but all the lads seemed to do was drink, drink, drink! And if they ordered anything it was a double spaghetti bolognese – always a double, never a single one.

  They put Ronnie on pills for his schizophrenia, which may have altered his appearance, too. There was a bent doctor who used to live on the Isle of Dogs, and Ronnie used to go down there for his tablets.

  This is little Gary Kray (bottom), Charlie’s boy, outside Fort Vallance, aged nine or ten, with Tommy ‘the Bear of Tottenham’ Brown. Gary was a troublemaker – I never liked him. He was always pinching off Violet and his aunties, blagging money off people.

  As he got into his teens and twenties he thought he could say anything, thought he was untouchable because he was a Kray. I remember telling him, ‘If you keep saying that you’re going to get yourself and your uncles into a lot of trouble.’ He got a bit nasty with a pal of mine: he tried to borrow some money off him and said, ‘I’m going to get my uncle to shoot you.’

  ‘You’re going to say that to the wrong people,’ I told him.

  But Mrs Kray thought the world of him.

  Tommy Brown was of Gypsy stock. His wife was a fortune teller and they lived in a caravan. Before he died, he used to have a greyhound he took to Gedding Hall to see Geoff Allan.

  This is Cousin Rita (right) – who later wrote a book (Inside the Kray Family, 2001) – with Mrs Kray and Reggie at the Double R club in the late fifties. Violet was a lovely lady, but all the books say she didn’t know – of course she knew what was going on! But it was sad to see her sons later go missing from her life. Rita, you couldn’t get to know – she was a bit snobbish. She used to leave you alone so I didn’t bother with her.

  Reggie is with George Osbourne and Tommy Brown at the Double R in about 1960. By this time it was a very successful club.

  Violet and Charlie Senior are handing over money to the British Empire Cancer Campaign in 1961. The charities were all a scam – it was all to be Mr Nice Guy! It was bollocks: half of it never got there. If they handed two grand over, the Krays would have kept a grand. But they weren’t greedy that way, if you were in with them. I had a Rolex watch given to me by Ronnie that I’ve got in my safety box now. If you showed respect for him, provided you didn’t take a liberty, he was all right. But if he could walk all over you then he fucking well would! Both of them would.

  The Double R club, around 1959–60. Tony Snyder (left, with his poodle) was always pulling a gun and threatening to shoot somebody. Reggie chinned him and knocked the fuck out of him in the billiard hall. Georgie Woods (standing next to Ronnie) has a glass in his hand and a broken nose. He was a right good robber and got put on Dartmoor for ten years. See Ronnie’s hand on his shoulder: that’s to say, ‘I’m with him.’ They weren’t anybody then and Woodsy was a main face at the time.

  This was at the opening of the boxing gym above the Double R, in 1961. Henry Cooper was European heavyweight champion, famous at the time, but he always claimed he didn’t know the Krays – yet there he is standing right in the middle of them. He later denied opening the club. I’ve got another few photos with Henry in them. He’d have known what they were doing, but of course they didn’t start killing till ’66.

  This is an official function at Esmeralda’s Barn on the middle floor, in 1961–62. I went there a few times. It’s the site of the Berkeley Hotel now. There’s the Lord Mayor in the centre; Checker Berry on the far left; Ronald Stafford (next to him) was a county surveyor, a big pal of Freddie Foreman’s, who used to get them bullion jobs because he knew the runs, but he got nicked in 1967 when a plane in Jersey with a load of bullion was put down to him.

  The Krays used to do charity shows for people – boxing charities, spina bifida charities, they’d do anything to jump in. But they’d take half the fucking money anyway! Royal Navy Commander Diamond (to the right of Ronnie) helped them get the Barn.

  A drinking club in the West End, 1963. Back row, from left: Pat Butler, George Osbourne, the twins, pop singer Terry Dean and Curly King, who had a little gang of his own. Front row: Ronald Stafford, Mad Teddy Smith (behind Charlie Kray’s arm), actor Tom Yeardy, who finished up working with Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser, and Limehouse Willy – who got slashed by Teddy Berry after a falling-out at a club.

  I knocked Mad Teddy Smith out. I used to go out with a girl called Cathy Donoghue (her sister Annie married Tommy Steele). She used to have a flat in Great Newport Street, just off Trafalgar Square. By this time we’d split up and I didn’t see her much. I got a call from the Black Angus steakhouse underneath Cathy. The manager says, ‘She’s upstairs, they’re having trouble with a chap.’

  She had her boyfriend with her and Teddy tried to pal him up. She wanted him out of her flat. I said, ‘It’s not the Teddy Smith of the Krays, is it?’ This was after their 1965 court case.

  So, I went up and said, ‘’Ello, Teddy, it’s time you were going.’

  If he took his jacket off there was nowt about him, it was all fucking pads. So, when I chinned him, I wasn’t chinning someone who was a tearaway – my daughter’s lad would beat him even now. It was a little flat and I thought he was going to come back in, so I hit him with a smart left hook.

  The stairs were like a spiral staircase on a lighthouse. He went down three or four of them and I kicked him down a few more.

  ‘I can’t see, I can’t see!’ he said.

  You had to press a button and a light would come on for twenty seconds. When he thought he couldn’t see, the lights had gone off! By the time I put the light on he’d pissed off. And then he disappeared altogether.

  The Krays put a lot of things about – they said they shot Teddy Berry’s leg off. It wasn’t them! They said they knew Peter Rachman (the notorious Notting Hill slum landlord) and he was 5 foot 10 – I knew Rachman well through my auntie, he was 5 foot 3 if he was stretching – and that they got five grand off him. It was bollocks!

  When you put a load of shit into good stories, people believe it. Like when Selwyn Cooney was killed: Freddie Foreman said he got everybody on board to make sure they all ‘saw’ the same thing. It was also said that the Nash brothers went to the Krays – they had nowt to do with it. Freddie said the Krays were too young, they were just up and coming, they didn’t know anybody then.

  Teddy Smith went to Australia after he disappeared in 1967, but everybody said he’d been killed and buried in Steeple Bay. I’ve got a friend Ray Rose, who went to see him and took photos. He said, ‘Who do you think this is?’

  ‘That’s Teddy Smith, but he’s old and bald!’

  He had done some TV work, and even written a TV play in Australia. He’d done well for himself – he
had a taxi firm and I think he wrote two children’s books. It’s just that, when he left, he never mentioned to anybody where he was going. He came home to London in 2000, before dying of cancer.

  Reggie with his childhood friend, Laurie O’Leary, and Curly King (right) – a Teddy boy who wasn’t much of a fighter, just a toerag, really. But it was he who first called the Krays’ home ‘Fort Vallance’.

  At the Society Club in Jermyn Street: if you look back at it as a snapshot of the sixties, you’ve got Jimmy Nash (second from left), you’ve got Christine Keeler and of course Ronnie Kray – it’s almost like you’ve got the people there whom the Establishment would see as threatening the fabric of society. (They say Jimmy Nash is Freddie Foreman in some books and Freddie goes mad about that. That’s Johnny Davies next to Nash.)

  Next to Christine is Leslie Holt, who introduced Ronnie to Lord Boothby – because Boothby was having Holt. So, Ronnie said, ‘Let’s get ’old of ’im and ’ave some photos taken.’

  Holt went to have a verruca taken off his foot but he died – the doctor gave him too much gas and he didn’t come round. The twins and Charlie (far right) with the actor Victor Spinetti and the Labour MP Tom Driberg (third and fifth from left) – two of Ronnie’s homosexual clique. Then you’ve got the boxers Terry Spinks and Len Harvey (fourth and sixth from left). Dave Foreland (before Reggie on the right) was running long-firm frauds – he was a pal of Leslie Payne’s. He shouldn’t have been with him as he’d been a right straight fella.

  (Payne asked me to do a long firm. He told me all about it and I had a meeting an hour later with Peter Rachman. Peter told me, ‘You don’t need it. You’ll finish up wearing a paper hat.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like a clown. Leave it alone.’)

  The Clark brothers (black guys on the right) were dancers – they used to have a studio at Tottenham Court Road. That’s how the Krays got to know them, and they knew all the theatre people and a lot of boxers too. Reggie said in one of his books how not many people knew that they went for lessons at the Clark brothers’ dance school. I think he made that one up, but he certainly shot their namesake Nobby Clark (second right) in the leg.

  Mad Teddy Smith, Ronnie and Lord Boothby, at Boothby’s house in Eton Square, Belgravia.

  I looked after Danny La Rue for seven years and saw things I’d rather not mention. Everybody who was gay could get nicked then. There was an underground for homosexuals. People were ‘cottaging’ in the toilets.

  Lord Boothby got a big whack of cash for ‘The Picture We Cannot Print’, ‘The Story We Can Never Tell’ in the Sunday Mirror. Who do you think finished up with the money? The Krays! Boothby was so much in debt that Geoff Allan said they got every fucking penny of it: ‘If you don’t pay, we’ll shop you altogether’ – and that would have been the end of him. Geoff got a whack of it; he said, ‘I’ll tell you, Frank, they had him by his bollocks!’

  Just after that he married a young woman called Wanda Sanna to prove he wasn’t homosexual. He also made a speech in Parliament, asking how long they were going to keep the Krays in prison on remand for the money-with-menaces charge.

  This is Fred’s loyal friend Bill Curbishley (manager of The Who) with Fred outside Roy Shaw’s house on the morning of Roy’s funeral. He went down for fifteen years for armed robbery at one point; I think Roy was on the job with him. Reggie helped get him out after a good few years. They all said he was set up.

  On the right is Freddie’s godson Christian Simpson, and Steve Wraith from Newcastle is also pictured.

  Ronnie is with the racehorse he bought for his mother, Solway Cross. On the left is the heavyweight Canadian boxer Larry Gains; on the right is Johnny Davies, who used to be a minder for Eddie Johnson, who owned the Two Puddings pub in Stratford.

  Johnny and Micky Fawcett had to have it on their toes once to David Litvinoff’s flat in Kensington. Litvinoff, a Jewish bohemian from the East End who associated with both the Swinging London set and the underworld, was always in trouble with people but Reggie and Ronnie didn’t slash him: he got slashed outside a tube station. Reggie said, ‘We sent someone at him’ – but they didn’t. In some books it says they put a sword in his mouth – that never happened. Me and Johnny Bindon’s pal used to see him a lot. In the film that Mick Jagger did with Bindon, Performance (1970), he was credited as technical consultant. Chas, the gangster character played by James Fox, is reputedly modelled on Freddie Foreman’s enemy, Jimmy Evans.

  Bobby Ramsey (left) got nicked with the Krays when they smashed up the Watney Street mob in 1956. Ronnie got three years and Ramsey got seven. After that he was Billy Hill’s minder, then he worked for Billy Walker’s brother George. He was a good fighter, but he used to write poetry and letters too. By this stage he was stuck into the unlicensed boxing circuit.

  Eddie Pucci (overleaf, left) was a big American football star turned hitman for the Mafia. He was shot on a golf course in the States; they assassinated him.

  Ex-world heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano (second from left) came over with Frank Sinatra Junior – he was minding him when he appeared at the Talk of the Town. I don’t know who the couple in between are, but the man on the right is the former gangster movie star and Colony Club host George Raft, a friend of the twins.

  The first time I ever saw the Krays in ’57/’58, they were wearing big overcoats that touched the ground – ‘gangsters’, both of them. They had great big padded suits. They were smart, but not city-smart, like bank managers and doctors are. Gangster-smart. When I befriended Ronnie he used to talk about Al Capone.

  You never knew which one you were going to get: Ronnie could be teary-eyed and crying, a complete bastard or the strong and silent type (he just didn’t know what to say unless he was doing business). He got on with Freddie Foreman when they were doing bad deeds.

  Ronnie with Frank Sinatra Junior at the Rainbow Club, Finsbury Park, in 1963. Frank was pursuing a career like his sister Nancy, who was doing a bit of singing. He wasn’t up to his dad or the other fellas, though.

  Sammy ‘The Yid’ Lederman had an agency and Charlie Kray jumped in to take it over. He started getting stars coming across because he knew Barbara Windsor. Charlie just thought he’d have to go drinking with them – he didn’t think it’d be a lot of hard work, signing cheques and reading contracts. Eddie Pucci and Rocky Marciano came through George Raft’s Colony Club. They all just leapt up together. Geoff Allan had a big place he was doing up as a club for Raft and the Mafia to take over. He got nicked for setting it on fire a week after Raft was kicked out of the country.

  Reggie Kray and his girlfriend, Frances Shea (centre right of table), at the Stork Club, Regent Street, London, in about 1963. Left of the table is William Frost – ‘Frosty’ – who was Ronnie’s driver. He was supposed to have been killed in ’67, but he was still alive in 2000. Connie Whitehead (third from left) used to run a long-firm fraud and the twins took it off him. He was in trouble, he got panicky, so he thought, ‘I’m going to get nicked here.’ But it was a bit of a torpedo for them. For some reason one of the firm was going to kill him, but the police stopped it.

  This is Reggie at Vallance Road. He’s got a great big gash on his lip – he’d had a fight with Ronnie the night before. Reggie said, ‘You silly cunt, you’ll get us all hung!’ It must have been ’64. They used to fight like fuck – ‘You fucking slag!’ they would call each other. But, once hanging got scrapped, they started killing people.

  Frances Kray (née Shea) was very quiet. I couldn’t understand why she wanted Reggie; even the vicar said their marriage (in April 1965) shouldn’t take place. And Ronnie was always having a dig at her. Frances used to go up to Steeple Bay with the twins (as seen overleaf with Reggie). He could be a bit nasty to her, and tell her to leave his brother alone.

  Just before they got nicked, Reggie had another girl, a blonde. But Reggie never made love to Frances. He liked women and he had plenty of birds, but Frances was a lovely girl and she shouldn’t
have been with him, ever.

  Ronnie had tried to rape Frankie Shea, Frances’s brother, just before she married Reggie. Frankie should have told his sister to leave them alone.

  Over the years I used to visit Reggie in prison. He seemed to think the world of her. Then a woman wrote a book about Reggie and Frances (Frances: The Tragic Bride, 2014) – the things he’d done to her! He put her in a hotel in Hyde Park and didn’t go home for two days. What he wanted, I don’t know.

  She was a typist at an office, he used to go and meet her. But he wouldn’t let her get a job after they got together. He did her in with his pushiness. She never used to take drugs but he got her into it.

  Reggie had other girls straight after Frances killed herself. After Charlie got his ten years, he came out before everybody else; he had photos of Reggie and a woman called Christine Boyce. Christine wrote to him all the time – just before he died she was still writing to him in prison. I think she was the love of his life, not Frances, because Frances was treated like shit. He really did treat her badly.