The Last Real Gangster Read online

  Reggie and Frances Kray’s wedding: 19 April 1965. Charlie and Dolly Kray and their son Gary are in the front row with the twins and the bride. Middle row: Mrs Shea (centre) and Violet. Back row: Frankie Shea Junior, Charlie Senior and Frankie Shea Senior.

  I knew her old man – a very quiet man who worked for the Krays now and again. Mrs Shea was a bit of a loudmouthed mother. Frances’ brother was quite successful but, after the Krays got nicked, he finished up an alcoholic. He killed himself a few years ago.

  World heavyweight champion Sonny Liston (centre) was allegedly killed by the Mafia via lethal injection; he died in 1970. Henry Simmonds (standing, left) was a big pal of Reg and Ron; he, Frank Warren and Jarvis Astair had the boxing tied up. His sister married Mickey Duff, the boxing promoter. Years later Johnny Davies (sitting, left) got a right tanning from the Tibbses, while he was in Spain waiting for his trial to come up. The Tibbs family were at one time considered the Krays’ East End successors after the twins’ 1969 conviction.

  The twins on their way to court with John Squibb, on trial for demanding money with menaces from Hew McCowan at the Hideaway club in 1965. ‘Squibby’ came from a Gypsy family; his father was a boxer. As a pal, he went back a long way with them. He went in and out of the firm.

  Ronnie Kray with Mickey Morris (overleaf) at La Dolce Vita nightclub in Newcastle, 1966. That was when the murders started. I’ve got transcripts of the trial and one of the prosecutors said George Cornell was killed because he went to Mickey’s brother and said, ‘Do you know why he took him to Newcastle? He only went to bed the poor sod!’

  After what happened at the Mr Smith & the Witchdoctor club in Catford, Cornell was the only one of the Richardson gang left at liberty. When it was all done and dusted, they knocked on Freddie Foreman’s door: ‘Let us in, there’s been a bit of trouble!’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Dickie Hart’s been killed; Eddie Richardson’s been shot; Frankie Fraser’s dead’ – they didn’t know he wasn’t. So, Freddie put them in flats all over London and one or two in caravans he had on the coast. Fraser always said Freddie set the whole thing up, but Freddie insisted he didn’t.

  As soon as the twins started killing, the original Kray firm made themselves scarce too. After the Cornell thing, Checker Berry and Billy Exley went missing. Exley had to have a gun at the side of him. The others went looking for him and asked, ‘Why don’t you join us anymore?’

  ‘Fucking hell, they’ve started killing everybody!’ he said. Straight lads, who were workers, had to physically prevent Ronnie from killing people every fucking night.

  And that’s why at the same time, in ’66, they should never have lost Leslie Payne – because he was the man who got them all their money. He stepped away. Between Payne and Bobby Teale, they sent the Krays down with what they knew about them. Payne put himself in it: ‘If you don’t charge me, I’ll tell you what I know.’

  Little Geoff Allan was about 5 foot 2. He had a big mansion at Saffron Walden, Essex, with a load of antiques. You can see the twins there, and Bobby Teale says in his book, Bringing Down the Krays, that he went to the mansion after McVitie’s murder.

  Geoff was into frauds; he was into anything he could make a quid at. He was into doing up old houses, restoring them to their former glory, but then one would get burned down accidentally. Before he died, he said, ‘I wouldn’t mind a last go at what I used to do with Reggie and Ron. I’ll tell you how it works: I’ll buy a property, I’ll put it in your name, say you buy it for twenty grand, we’ll insure it for a hundred and twenty grand. Do a bit of work on it, and after three months it goes up and you get your money.’

  So, we went looking and he said, ‘This is a lovely one.’ I’ve got a photo of the one we were going to set light to.

  But I said, ‘There’s people living round ’ere, kids playing in gardens. If you set this alight, you’ll catch all that.’

  ‘Fuck it, we’ll go somewhere else.’

  We found a nice little one in Norwich and we had it all set up but he died just before we were going to do it.

  Geoff was a villain, through and through. He liked to do insurance frauds above everything, but he had straight businesses: farms, shops, smashing restaurants.

  I read in Jimmy Evans’s book (The Survivor, 2002) that Ronnie shot a pig at Geoff Allan’s farm. They supposedly didn’t like the country, didn’t know the country – they were in the country all the time! With Evans you’ve got to know how to pick out what’s right and what’s not. There’s a lot of bollocks! Ronnie loved animals, so did Reggie. That’s why we’ve got Ronnie with his dogs; when he was younger and he was pulled by the police he gave his occupation as ‘dog breeder’.

  That’s former world heavy-weight champion Joe Louis with his arm around Reggie, at a personal appearance in a North East workingmen’s club in 1967. Looking over Louis’s shoulder is Alex Steene, a ticket tout from Leeds, who later passed his business onto his son, Greg. On the right, next to Ronnie, is Charlie Kray’s pal, Tommy Cowley. He was a little sneak, a gambler – I never liked the fucking weasel!

  On the left is Joey Pyle. He was a big guy, a fighter close to the Nashes. I got to know him eight years later. He was with the Nashes when they killed Selwyn Cooney at the Pen Club in 1960. Cooney was born in Leeds. There were two brothers, Selwyn and Laurie, and Laurie was my pal. I only told Joey I knew Selwyn later, before he died.

  I was with Selwyn the night before he was killed. He had a gun with him and said, ‘This is my equaliser.’ He’d had a fallout with the Nashes over a prostitute girlfriend who’d bumped Nash’s car. It was only seven and a half quid’s damage, and that’s what he got killed over – he’d given her a slap or something. That afternoon I rang Margaret, who he lived with, and she said, ‘He’s been crying all morning. The Nashes are after him.’ So, why he went to the fucking club … But he could fight, he was a street fighter.

  He was in the Pen Club with Billy Ambrose, Freddie Foreman’s best pal – who was in Dartmoor and kept coming home on weekend leave when he’d opened the club. Selwyn was shot with his own gun. When it was all over, Freddie went to the Nashes and got everybody on the same page about what had happened.

  Ronnie with friends in Barcelona in the early sixties. Pat Butler (white shirt) was the kid who screwed the takings from the collection box at the church where the Krays all got married and buried. I think Bobby Buckley (right) was in military prison with them, but The Sun later ran this photo and wrongly said he was the Bill actor Billy Murray.

  At that time Ronnie could get nicked over here for being homosexual so he’d have more freedom in a place like Tangiers, where he was photographed being driven by Ian Barrie in Billy Hill’s MG, in 1966. Christine Boyce took that photo. I’ve got another one where they swapped over and she’s in the driver’s seat.

  I met Billy Hill twice, with Cockney Joe. I just shook hands with him and he said to me, ‘I’m sorry about what happened to your pal, Selwyn Cooney.’ Hill said Selwyn would have been next in line – never mind the Krays, he’d have taken the lot of them. I had more to do with Jack Spot than Hill because he used to look after Cockney Joe, though I don’t know how the fuck Spot got to be considered a tearaway.

  There was nowt about Billy Hill – he was a user of other people, but he’d slash them as well. He was really successful after doing about twenty-five years in the nick in dribs and drabs. He was a somebody, but to me he looked like a nobody. In terms of villains, the top man is Freddie. Hill was a smart man with a lot of good minders – he had Bobby Ramsey, George Walker, so it wasn’t a matter of him, it was the people he had.

  Ronnie and Dickie Morgan with Tony Bennett. The twins had just been locked up in the nick but were released in the mid-sixties. They weren’t really villains as such. It’s a contradiction, but they liked to be seen doing glamorous things with stars. If someone had brought Rin Tin Tin along, they’d have wanted their photo taken with him – they just wanted to be seen.

  As Fredd
ie says, they didn’t really like being villains, though they were in the nick all the time. They were disdainful of the middle class, of clerical workers or people from a family of substance, but the hierarchy of stars they had respect for. If you were a film star or a singer, they’d like to be with you. But I know Eric Clapton came to play at Esmeralda’s Barn one afternoon, when he was with the Yardbirds, and Ronnie said, ‘Fuck off, all of you! We can’t hear ourselves speak upstairs!’

  Eric Mason (author of Inside the Underworld, 2007) got the twins into La Dolce Vita in Newcastle. The three with their backs to us were a Newcastle firm. This was the year before Dennis Stafford got done for the ‘one-armed bandit murder’, the killing of Angus Sibbet (the 1967 inspiration for Ted Lewis’s 1969 novel, Jack’s Return Home – which in turn provided the basis of the classic 1971 British crime film, Get Carter).

  I knew Angus, did a lot of business with him. The Krays were on a retainer with the bloke who used to supply the clubs with one-armed bandits in London and Newcastle. He found out Sibbet was pinching money from him and he got shot. I know the Krays were there a couple of days before it happened – they didn’t do it, but I got the feeling they were involved in it. All his life Reggie Kray slagged Stafford off – ‘That cunt!’ – and Stafford never liked Reg and Ron.

  But he got fitted up. They couldn’t even prove he was in the place at the time. He and his brother came back from Majorca that week, and that’s when Sibbet got killed. I’ve got photos of the other guy who was done for the killing, Michael Luvaglio, at the gym where Reggie’s standing next to him in ’61.

  Ronnie at the Talk of the Town (now the Hippodrome), for the birthday of former welterweight Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis (overleaf, right). He’s with his old pal Sophie Tucker, an American singer, who was kind of a Mae West figure. Lewis was world champion when she was at the top of her form. To the far left of them is Duke Osbourne. I knew him – my pal used to buy drugs from him. Just like Fred, he could tell a good story. He came from a good family but he was a bum chum of Ronnie; they were fucking each other.

  Winston’s club, 1968 (overleaf): just before the Krays’ final arrest. Left to right: singer Leapy Lee (‘Little Arrows’); actor/singer Tony Mercer (The Black and White Minstrel Show); Christine Boyce – who was in Reggie’s bed when they woke him up and arrested him that morning; Reggie; Joe Wilkins, the club owner; Jimmy Evans, Wilkins’s best pal; unknown; Tommy Cowley.

  Evans was so lucky. Billy Howard was angry with him for what he’d done to George Foreman: ‘Give that fucker a hiding!’ He slipped out of Winston’s just before we got there. He was a smallish fella but he was a dangerous little fucker. He had the needle, I think, because he was in a Mickey Mouse firm and he thought the Foremans were involved in the Train Robbery: ‘He was giving my wife ten-shilling notes to change.’ Evans wasn’t in the same class as Freddie in terms of being a top villain.

  Ronnie in New York with Dickie Morgan (overleaf, left) and boxer Willie Pep, who was involved with the Mafia; they had him under their wing. The fellow on the end with the moustache grassed them up: Alan Bruce Cooper was an informer for the American police, trained up to get them nicked.

  Everybody was shopping each other at the end. If you look at the Krays’ case, everyone but the dog gave evidence against them. The Lambrianous did after they got weighed off: ‘We shouldn’t have said what we said, Ronnie did it and Reggie did it.’ They turned after the case. Ronnie Hart shopped them, Donoghue shopped them, the Teale brothers shopped them, Exley shopped them … They all bloody shopped them!

  Ronnie in New York with Mafia man Joe Kaufman (he got nicked with them). Reggie broke Kaufman’s jaw in the nick because he turned on them. He was reading a paper when Reggie did it.

  Charlie Kray (right) got a ten for supposedly disposing of the body of Jack the Hat. It was ’69 when he got weighed off, and he did seven. This photo came at Tony Lambrianou’s (left) release in 1984, after he did his full fifteen. I met him once or twice, but I could never understand Freddie doing a book with him; he was a nobody. He did a job and went down for it – robbing a Wimpy Bar. But he was so unlucky to get fifteen years. He wasn’t on the firm that long, and, instead of turning Queen’s evidence like Donoghue, he kept quiet. Okay, he and his brother took Jack the Hat to get murdered, but he was just an also-ran. Had he turned QE and shopped them, he’d have got out of it.

  But he got a living as soon as he got out the nick. Reggie phoned me and said, ‘I’ve just seen an article on that cunt. He gave evidence against me at the end! After he got weighed off, he fucking went in with his brother and came out with the truth.’

  Freddie didn’t find out till after they’d done their book (Getting It Straight: Villains Talking, as told to Carol Clerk, 2002). Lambrianou started crying when they were working on it in his flat: ‘I didn’t mean to do it …’

  ‘What made you do a book with Lambrianou? He wasn’t in your league,’ I said.

  Freddie said he just wanted a partner to bounce questions off – a double act of comedians, one serious, one funny. ‘What do you think, Fred?’ he would say. Freddie would tell the story and Lambrianou would say, ‘Yeah, that was it.’

  Reggie Kray training in Parkhurst prison, Isle of Wight, 1991. I started visiting Reggie on the mainland because he could have visits only from his family when he first got weighed off. I went everywhere you can imagine – Leicester, Nottingham, Birmingham, about ten different prisons. I’ve got letters from him at every prison.

  In Nottingham prison, I’d gone to visit him with Charlie and another fella called Brown – he was about 6 foot 2, he looked like Tommy Brown, a big lad. He was on the visit to try to get Reggie to sign an agreement for him to run a security business, at nightclubs, in their name. I got involved when he was guarding factories and warehouses.

  Reggie wanted a private visit in the chapel. At the back was a big colour painting of Christ. He had his shirt wide open and we could see his six-pack. He was brown because he used to sunbathe. He never swore on prison visits, but he did this day: ‘What ’ave you been fuckin’ doin’?’

  He was getting ready to have a go and pushed the corner of the table at me.

  ‘What’s your problem, Reg?’

  It turned out that I’d taken a fella in with me who’d done a book and ripped them off. He thought I was covering for him, which I wasn’t.

  ‘I’ll fuckin’ knacker ya!’

  ‘It won’t do you any good in ’ere,’ I said, because I had that big fella with me. ‘If you let go at me, forget it.’

  So I got up and walked away.

  ‘Don’t go, don’t go!’

  He followed me out and said he was sorry, so I went back and sat with him.

  One other time he did that and I turned on him – told him to fuck off or I’d rip his head off. He said to my wife, Noelle, ‘That husband of yours, he’s a nutter!’

  I have got a quick temper, but there was one thing going through my mind: you have to stamp on ’em before they stamp on you. He was fucking screaming at me – but maybe it was all bravado.

  I thought he was going to put one on me before I sat down, but he didn’t – he sat down too.

  I visited Ronnie in Broadmoor dozens of times. Broadmoor isn’t a prison, it’s a hospital and they can get dressed up in their normal clothes – they have big, strong guards, that’s all. Anything you had for him, you could leave at the desk: ‘I’ve got a thousand cigarettes for him.’

  ‘Just sign there and pass them over.’

  (Ronnie Kray’s death from heart failure, on 17 March 1995, has been attributed to his habit of chain-smoking between sixty and a hundred roll-ups per day.)

  So, it was just a hospital they couldn’t get out of. He had his suits on.

  ‘What you want, Frank?’ he used to say to me.

  I’d have a coffee or a non-alcoholic beer. This fella in a white jacket would be working for Ronnie.

  ‘Put it on my bill.’

  Obviously he had his moments, but yo
u saw him all dressed up in the best Savile Row suits, ties and shirts. I bought him three or four sets of ties and shirts but I made sure I was paid the money early. He’d always have a different suit and watch on – and his watches were nothing cheap. I had one given to me when he went to the nick, but he gave a lot away when he was in there. People thought he was doing it for favours, but he wasn’t

  He was a giver; he was a contradiction.

  Ronnie used to say to Reg, ‘Fuck prison, get in ’ere with me, it’s in a different class!’ But Reggie wanted to get out. Deep down, he thought he would. He said, ‘If I get in there, Frank, I’ll never get out.’ But he’d have had an easier time.

  Ronnie once said to me, ‘I couldn’t ’ack it in nick any more, I ’ad to come ’ere,’ because he was getting into fights. He’d have either got killed or he’d have killed somebody. He lasted only about five or six years in regular prison.

  When he was in Broadmoor, Ronnie wanted some ties made with ‘Krays’ on. So, I contacted a tie maker and shirt maker called Frank Rostron for him: he wanted a few samples done.

  ‘We’ll get ’em done in different colours, iron the exes out and send ’em in to Ronnie,’ I said.

  He got on the phone and bollocked me.

  ‘These are samples, we’ve got to see if you like ’em,’ I explained.