My Story

by Ronald Kray

  Jack Spot hired us to do a bit of work for him, keeping an eye on his bookmakers’ pitches at racecourses, just in case other gangs tried to move in on them, or in case anyone tried to pinch the money. There wasn’t a lot of trouble as it turned out, though me and Reg always had plenty of weapons in our car, just in case. We enjoyed the days at the races but we packed it in in the end because we had too many other things starting to go for us. The Regal was still doing well, but we had one or two other projects on the side. We could supply dockers’ tickets, documents which would enable a man to work as a docker, earning big money for just a few hours’ work. We used to sell these tickets for varying amounts, depending on what we thought a man could afford to pay. We had a nice little thing going with a doctor in the East End who would sign documents which got young lads out of doing National Service, which everyone hated. Lads and their parents used to pay us well for this service. And we were also involved in a little business bringing watches through London docks, unofficially. At that stage we were just two sharp fellers trying to get a bit of cash together so that we could buy one or two clubs and be legitimate. See, I think me and Reg would have been good businessmen. We both had brains in our heads and we were both hard workers. We probably wouldn’t have been completely ‘straight’, but I don’t think we were destined to be criminals. It wasn’t really in the family, or anything like that. It just sort of happened.

  We still liked a scrap, of course we did, and we sometimes used to get into little battles. We did it for fun, really. Reggie once worked out he’d broken eleven men’s jaws in fights. See, me and Reg have always admired fighters, in the ring and out. We like men who are game. When we were younger we used to admire men like Billy Bligh and Tommy Smithson. Billy was from Clerkenwell, only a little feller, but he was as game as anything. He died in Wandsworth from a burst ulcer. Tommy Smithson was a well-known villain, a hard man who was shot to death by a Maltese gang. I would say he was game. I would say that the gamest men I’ve known would be Freddie Foreman, who did time with us, Jimmy Nash, and Frankie Fraser, who used to be with the Richardson gang. These are the sort of men we’ve always admired.

  Me and Reg didn’t really have any bother with the police till we were twenty-three. That was in 1957. Two friends of ours, who ran a club, had been having trouble with an Irish gang, and they weren’t sure how to deal with it. The ringleader, I was told, was a feller called Terry Martin, so I thought I would go and sort him out. I was told that Terry Martin was drinking in a pub called the Britannia, in Stepney. I went round there and I found Martin playing cards with some other men in the saloon bar. I asked him to come outside, and we had a fight in the street. I hurt him, quite badly, because I thought he deserved it.

  Martin was taken to hospital and the matter should have ended there. But, instead, when he was interviewed by the police in his hospital bed, Martin did the unforgivable thing - he broke the East End code of conduct and he grassed on me. The police, obviously, were out to get me, because they gave Martin protec¬tion and he later gave evidence against me at the Old Bailey. Mind you, he had to get out of London quickly as soon as the trial was over, and he never came back. He would have been in real trouble if he had.

  I got sent down for three years on a charge of GBH. I remember the judge, Sir Gerald Dodson, who was the Recorder of London, saying to me in court: ‘It would seem there has existed, for some time, a state of gang warfare, dangerous to all concerned.’ It wasn’t really gang warfare at all. Or, if it was, it was nothing like what it was going to be, when me and Reg really got going. But for the time being I was out of the game, and I was well pissed off about it. They sent me to Wandsworth and I was doing all right there, I was coping okay, until that bastard warder told me that my auntie Rose had died. I went into a state of real depression. I couldn’t seem to get out of it. Wandsworth is a depressing place, anyway, but I was really bad. So they sent me to Camp Hill, a soft prison on the Isle of Wight, because, I suppose, they thought I might be happier there.

  But I wasn’t. It just felt a long way from London and Reg and the family. I got very withdrawn and disorientated, and I had a mental breakdown. I didn’t know how ill I was, nor did they. They didn’t know how to deal with it. They transferred me to the psychiatric wing at Winchester prison, but I just went out of control. I just wanted to smash everything and everybody. I couldn’t seem to get me mind sorted. They certified me insane in February 1958. It was a bad time, a frightening experience. Once they even put me in a strait-jacket. No one could control me, I couldn’t even control myself. They gave me drugs, but they seemed to make it worse. They didn’t know what to do with me at Winchester, so they moved me to Long Grove Mental Hospi¬tal. When I was there I started to feel a bit better but I was surrounded by other people who were really ill in their heads, really sick. I felt sorry for them but I knew that I would not get better in a place like that. I knew I had to get out. Some people have said that I deliberately faked my mental illness just so I would get sent to Long Grove. It wasn’t true. But I knew the doctors at Long Grove might not set me free for a long time. They could have kept me there as long as they liked, I could have stayed there a lot longer than the three years I was sent down for. Reg looked into it for me and he found out that if I managed to get out and stay out for more than fourteen days, then the doctors would have to re-examine me to see if I was fit enough to be released at the proper time. That was the law. So we worked out a good scam to get me out.

  Reg and three other friends came to visit me. They were brought into the locked ward which I shared with several other patients. Reg was wearing a similar navy blue suit to the one I was wearing, and a similar grey check shirt, blue tie and black shoes. At the end of visiting time it was me who walked out of the hospital with our three friends, and Reggie who was sat in the ward reading a newspaper. Of course, they didn’t realize that until I was well clear and Reggie demanded to be let out. There was a bit of argy-bargy with the police, who had no choice but to let him go with a few threats about prosecuting him. Like I said,

  I only needed to be out for fourteen days, but I liked it better outside so I stayed out for a hundred and forty-five days. I lived most of the time in Suffolk, in a caravan on a farm owned by a friend of ours, but sometimes I came back to London. A few times I even slept in my own bed in Vallance Road. The police eventually found me there, took me back to Long Grove, where the doctors re-examined me and said I was a lot better. I stayed there for a bit more observation, then they moved me back to Wandsworth, and eventually released me in the spring of 1959. They said I should have some more treatment as an out-patient at a mental hospital in London, but I only went a few times because I didn’t think it was doing me any good. I was feeling a lot better. I still had bad times, but not so many.

  While I’d been away, Reg had been busy. He had found some premises in the Bow Road which he turned into our club the Double R. It was a drinking and gambling club, and it was very successful. On the night it opened he sent me a telegram at Wandsworth. With some help from our brother Charlie he’d also bought a couple of spiels, illegal drinking clubs. Small, not very attractive places, but they made good money from people who wanted to drink out of hours. Over the years we owned about thirty-four different clubs and spiels, but I think I liked the Double R best of all. I liked it partly because it was our first club and partly because downstairs it had a fully equipped gym where we used to meet a lot of our friends from the boxing world. Henry Cooper, one of the greatest heavyweights this country has ever produced, did the opening ceremony for us. We knew all the big names of boxing, including Billy Walker, another famous heavyweight fighter.

  Me and Reg also really liked the Kentucky club, in the Mile End Road in Stepney, which we opened in 1963. It was a really plush place with lots of red velvet and big mirrors. In the swinging sixties the Kentucky was one of the ‘in’ places to be.

  By the early sixties me and Reg had collected a gang. We didn’t set out to do it, it just happened.
Fellers used to hang around with us and they just sort of stayed. We became known as the Firm. I never really liked us being called that, I always thought it was a name that could backfire on us one day. Why? Well, the Firm implies that something is well organized, and the police never like to think criminals are well organized. It’s better to try and keep a low profile. During our trial at the Old Bailey in 1969, the prosecution lawyers kept using the word, and one of them asked me: ‘Is it right that you and your gang are known as the Firm?’ I took out a small dictionary I always kept in my pocket, found the right page, and said to him: ‘The word Firm means commercial enterprise. Well, I’m out of work and I haven’t got a factory or any other commercial enterprise, so it looks like you’re wrong.’ But we had put together a strong gang of men. Me and Reg were the leaders and under us we had men like Ian Barrie, Pat Connolly, Tommy ‘The Bear’ Brown, Big Albert Donaghue, Sammy Lederman, Cornelius ‘Connie’ Whitehead, Ronnie Bender, Tony and Chrissie Lambrianou, Scotch Jack Dickson, Ronnie Hart, and many more. Some did a lot of work for us, some did little. Some were important, some weren’t. Nearly all of them, with the exception of Ian Barrie, let us down in the end, grassed on us and told lies about us, just to save their own skins.

  Apart from the clubs, we had plenty of other things going. One of the best earners was a little scam called the Long-term Fraud. How it worked was so simple. We’d rent a warehouse in a phoney name and set up a phoney company in the names of other people. We’d begin to order stuff from major suppliers - televisions, washing machines, furniture, that sort of thing. We’d only order small amounts, and make sure they were paid promptly. This would go on for some months until we’d got the confidence of the suppliers, then we’d order enough stuff to fill the warehouse. Then, wallop, we’d sell off the lot quickly and fairly cheaply - and disappear. It never failed. Instant cash, and no trouble.

  Mind you, if there ever was any trouble, we were well equipped to deal with it. We had gradually got together a real arsenal of weapons which we kept in various safe places. The thing that made us different from most gangs in London in those days was that we weren’t afraid to use them. I’ve shot several people over the years. The first person I shot was an ex-boxer called Shorty, who was trying to put the squeeze for protection money on a friend of ours who owned a garage. Shorty didn’t know this feller was a friend of ours, of course. When Shorty went to the garage to collect his money, he found me there waiting for him. He started to get lippy, made a couple of threats, so I shot him in the leg with an automatic Luger. The police arrested me and put me on an identification parade, but Shorty wasn’t stupid and he didn’t pick me out.

  Another time, a feller called George Dixon upset me in a club, and I tried to kill him. I took out my Luger, aimed it at his head and pulled the trigger. Dixon was lucky because the gun jammed. He ran out of the club fucking quickly. It must have been a million to one against the gun jamming. Later I made friends with Dixon and gave him the bullet. I thought it would be a good reminder to him to be careful about who he upset. Another time, I was having a drink at the Central club, in Clerkenwell, with an Italian feller by the name of Battles. This club was a meeting place for all the Italians in London at the time. While I was there I got into an argument with a feller by the name of Billy Alco. I took my gun out of my pocket and took a shot at Alco. Luckily I missed him and I’m pleased now I did because he has become a good friend over the years and has come to see me at Broadmoor. People used to ask me why I was so unpredictable, so volatile. I didn’t know then, but I think now it was my mental illness, my paranoia. I just couldn’t stop myself from hurting people, especially if I thought they were slighting me or plotting against me. Also, I liked the feeling of guns.

  Usually, though, I was happier with my fists or a knife. I had a lot of scraps with people, and I cut quite a few people with my knife. But we didn’t set out to make people frightened of us, we like to think we got things out of people because they respected us, not because they feared us. I mean, another thing they always say about the Krays is that we ran all the big protection rackets in London. That’s not true, we were never involved in protection, not as such. People are always saying we used to send our men round to clubs and restaurants and shops and threaten to smash them up unless they gave us money. But we never did that, we didn’t have to. People used to come to us and ask us to look after their places, to keep other gangs away or small-time villains operating on their own. But we were never involved in protection. We never used to go to them and say, ‘If you don’t give us this money we’ll smash your place up.’ I deny that strongly. We had a reputation in the East End and the West End for looking after places. There were some who said we collected protection money but that is wrong, it’s all lies. If people want to call it protection, they can, but it wasn’t protec-tion as we see it. If the people we helped wanted to give us gifts, that was up to them. Usually it was cigarettes or cases of drink but we never forced them. We didn’t have to. We had so much money coming in, we were worth millions. Millions. We gave it all away. Money, jewellery, watches, rings, cuff-links, nights out on the town, cars, everything. We gave a lot of money to charity, and to boys’ clubs, and of course we blew a lot of it on ourselves. Even the police were always trying to pin protection on us.

  Shortly after I got out in 1959, the police stitched Reggie up on a money with menaces charge. A Polish feller called Murray Podlo, who ran a shop in the Finchley Road, said Reg had threatened to cut him unless he gave him a hundred pounds. A hundred quid? For fuck’s sake, at that time we were paying the doormen on our clubs more than that, we were giving away more than that in tips. Why would Reg have risked his freedom for such a small amount of money? It was a frame-up and Reg got eighteen months. Even though Podlo later retracted his evidence, Reg was still convicted and sent to Wandsworth.

  But really the early sixties were a good time for us. Business was booming. We opened up more clubs, like the Green Dragon and Dodgers, in Whitechapel, we had several spiels doing good business, and we had pubs, including the Carpenters Arms, near Mile End underground station. We did that place up nicely with red-striped Regency wallpaper and plush red velvet seats. That was one of our favourite places. Me and Reg would go there often at nights, get out our contact books and ring around all our friends. They would come round and we would have some great boozy nights that finally ended up in the West End in the early hours of the next day. Me and Reg were big drinkers, we could drink spirits till the cows came home, but we could take it well, we didn’t get really drunk very often. We turned the Carpenters into a sort of private club for us and our friends. Not everything we touched worked out, though. We lost a packet investing in a development project in a place called Enugu, in Nigeria, after Ernest Shinwell, the son of the Labour MP Manny Shinwell, had talked us into joining a consortium he had formed. It looked like a good thing at the time but it taught us a lesson: never get involved in things you can’t control personally. It was like a seaside development, the sort of thing you get in Spain and places like that. You know, apartments, shops, offices, that sort of thing, for the wealthy Africans and, maybe, Europeans to go to. We put a lot of money into the thing, up front, because it seemed okay. But the money disappeared and we never got it back, and the project just disappeared. You know, it is difficult doing business with people like that. I went over to Nigeria to have a look. It wasn’t much of a place but the people were yery friendly. The feller showing me round asked me if there was anything I specially wanted to see. I said I would like to see their jail. It was terrible, it made Parkhurst look like a holiday camp. I couldn’t wait to get out of the place.

  We lost money with Shin well, we also lost money when we got involved with Lord Effingham, though in both cases it wasn’t their fault. We used Lord Effingham, alias Mowbray, Henry Gordon, Sixth Earl of Effingham, Lord Howard of Effingham, as our sort of front man in our first move into the West End. It was a gambling club called Esmerelda’s Bam, a very upmarket place in Wilto
n Place, in Knightsbridge. We used a lot of our own money in that venture, none of it was Effie’s, as we used to call him. He didn’t have a lot of cash - in fact we were better off than he was. When he became an earl, after his father died, Effie was well quoted as saying: ‘All I inherited was my title and my Coronation robes.’ We paid him well to act as the club’s ‘greeter’ and just to be seen around the place. We thought he would appeal to the sort of people who would use the club. I liked Effie and we treated him with respect. It’s not true that I used to take the piss out of him by saying things like ‘Get the effing tea, Effie.’

  Esmerelda’s Bam didn’t work out for us, really, because of the tax men. They were getting upset because we weren’t paying any, and they started to put a lot of pressure on us. It was them who forced us to cut our losses and get out of the West End. They were getting really heavy and we were mindful of the fact that it was the Revenue who put Al Capone out of business. It was a pity. We enjoyed watching the hooray Henrys getting their comeuppance at the card tables and the roulette wheels. But in the end we decided the whole deal was costing us too much and giving us too much hassle.

  Sexually, too, the sixties was a good time. It was a time of real freedom. I have never made any secret that I am bisexual. I like men as well as women. I don’t think there is anything wrong in that. Some people have criticized me for it, over the years, but the ones I have heard making comments have lived to regret it. I have even been open enough to explain my feelings on this to Scene Out, which is a magazine for gays.