My Story

by Ronald Kray

  Another time, a man came to see me - like, I mean a man who was straight, who had no criminal connections, but who knew that the Krays could help him where the police weren’t bothered - and he told me that a feller from Mile End had broken his daughter’s nose in three places because she wouldn’t have sex with him. The police didn’t want to know. One of them told this man that his daughter was probably just a prick-teaser. Nice, eh? Just the sort of thing you want to hear if your daughter has been marked for life by some tearaway. Anyway, we knew of this feller that the man was complaining about, because we knew he had also broken the jaw of a seventeen-year-old boy in another unprovoked attack.

  It was time something was done about him before he started getting ideas above his station. So I phoned this feller up and told him I wanted to meet him at Esmerelda’s Barn. He fell for it; he thought because it was me calling him he was going to be given a job to earn himself some money. But he was a dirty little rat, so I thought I’d set an example with him for the whole East End. And I did. I taught him the lesson he would never forget with the hot poker. If he’s alive today, then he’ll still have the scars.

  We’ve both been violent in our time, me and Reg, but neither of us ever actually enjoyed the violence. It’s just like soldiers in the war, the SAS and all that. They’re not violent people in themselves, really, but it’s a job, and they have to do it. We were the same.

  In the film The Krays they said we said we could get anything by fear, but we never said that. On the front cover of the video of the film it says: ‘If people are afraid of you, you can do anything … remember that.’ But we didn’t operate like that. We used respect, not fear. There is a big difference. If people respect you they will do what you ask. If they are frightened of you they will simply run away and hide from you. People like Cornell and McVitie tried to rule people with fear. If you don’t believe me, get hold of a book by Sir Joseph Simpson, the Home Office pathologist, who writes about Cornell and Jack the Hat and says they won’t be missed and they was horrible people. We understood about people like them and we dealt with them. But what we could never understand was fellers like Ronnie Hart, our own cousin. Me and Reg had been really good to him, given him the good life, and yet - to save his own skin - he told Nipper Read everything he wanted to hear. He even made a statement implicating the two totally innocent friends of mine who had been at Blonde Carol’s flat on the night Jack McVitie got it. Those two young fellers had to stand up to some very harsh police interrogation. But they refused to make statements. They acted like real men and I was very sorry when one of them later took an overdose of drugs, and died. I still feel Ronnie Hart acted very badly. I hope his family and friends realize what a little rat he is.

  John Dickson was another. Dickson used to drive Reggie around. We gave him a job on the Firm when he came down from Scotland. He was skint till we gave him a chance. But he’s another one who was willing to drop us in the shit just so’s he would come up smelling of roses. And the snivelling little bastard has even cashed in and wrote a book about us.

  He says in his book that after the disappearance of the Mad Axeman, Frank Mitchell, he stayed with me at my flat in Cedra Court. He wrote: ‘I eventually dozed off. I was awakened by the smell of gas. The gas fire in my room had been left with the gas switch open. I got up and turned it off. I didn’t sleep after that. My mind was working overtime. Did Ronnie come in and turn it on? Or did I, accidentally, turn it on? I never found the answer to that one.’ But if I had really wanted to kill him, I would have done so straight out. And they would never have found his body in a million years.

  The police and many others have tried to blame us for the death of Frank Mitchell, the Mad Axeman, in 1966. The truth of the matter is, me and Reg know who killed Frank Mitchell - and it wasn’t us. We would never have killed Big Frank. We had too much admiration for him. For those who don’t know it, let me tell you the story of one of the gamest men who ever worked in the underworld.

  Frank Mitchell came from a large, poor family in Canning Town. He was a simple man, but a good man, and he was the biggest, strongest man I ever saw in my life. Right from an early age he was in and out of prisons and mental hospitals and they all tried, and failed, to break him. He was birched, given the cat- o’-nine-tails, even beaten to a pulp while he was strapped in a strait-jacket. But they never broke him. He escaped from Ramp- ton and he escaped from Broadmoor by using the springs of his bed and turning them into a sort of key. When he was out he got into the house of a couple living nearby and he nearly frightened them to death by making them sit and have a cup of tea and watch the television with him. The problem was, he had an axe balanced on his knee at the time. That was how he got the name the Mad Axeman.

  But he wasn’t mad, Frank wasn’t. And he wouldn’t have hurt that couple. He only hurt people who got in his way, especially screws, in prison. Finally, they sent him to Dartmoor in Devon, which, at the time, they said was a prison that no one would ever escape from. Frank was there for nine years and the staff left him alone to do more or less what he wanted. They realized it was safer from their point of view because he could be a bit dangerous if he got angry. He had a hell of a life inside Dartmoor. When it all came out in court later, no one could believe it. Even the judge said, ‘It all sounds like Cloud Cuckoo Land to me!’

  Frank and his best friend in Dartmoor, another convict called Frank Benson, would wander in and out of the prison more or less as they wanted. They used to go riding on ponies across the moor, sometimes they would ride motorbikes they kept hidden near the prison, and sometimes they would go drinking in pubs on the moor. Frank even used to have sex with a local woman in a bam. Once he and Frank Benson - who was a small, quiet feller who knew how to handle Frank - took a taxi into Okehampton, the nearest town of any size, to buy a budgerigar. As long as the two Franks were back inside their cells by lights-out, none of the screws seemed to worry.

  Dartmoor was a joke. Once my brother Reg disguised himself, used a false name, and went to visit Frank at the prison with the former boxer, Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, to show some boxing films while Ted talked about his career to the cons. Reg even had dinner with the Governor after the event, and the Governor told him: ‘Don’t forget to come back again!’

  Eventually Frank got fed up with Dartmoor and upset because the authorities wouldn’t review his case. He asked us to get him away from the prison, so we did. On the 12 December 1966, we had him picked up by a car near the prison. Frank was with a working party and he just quietly walked away. By the time the stupid bastards realized he was gone, he was two hundred-odd miles away in London. We put him up at a flat in Barking owned by a friend of ours called Lennie Dunn.

  Frank needed company, so some fellers in the Firm used to take it in turns to sit with him and chat to him. Mainly it was Scotch Jack Dickson, a feller called Billy Exley, and ‘Mad’ Teddy Smith. Smith wrote a letter for Frank Mitchell to the Home Secretary, asking that his case should be investigated, and his request for freedom should be considered. We sent copies of the letter to the Daily Mirror and The Times. We never got a reply from the Home Secretary.

  Frank started to get restless and we didn’t know what to do with him. We couldn’t really pack him off back to Dartmoor, could we? Then Billy Exley and three Greek fellers said that, if we gave them some money, they’d get him a false passport and take him abroad. We weren’t too happy, but Frank said it was what he wanted to do. So, on 23 December they took him away. I had bad feelings about it. Later we heard that Frank had fallen out with Exley and the Greeks. So they killed him. I was told it took three bullets to kill him, and that Exley pulled the trigger on the final shot, which went straight through Frank Mitchell’s head. It was obvious to me that, once they’d got Frank away from us, they suddenly began to realize it was a bigger job than they thought. So they took the easy way out: they killed the big feller. So it was Exley and the Greeks who done him - not us.

  But then Exley talked to Nipper Read, naming members of
our Firm as the killers, and the bastard got away scot-free. At our trial the prosecution even told the court that Exley was a dying man with a bad heart who could go at any second. In fact, Billy’s heart held out for another twenty years!

  The whole thing was a non-starter. Albert Donaghue, a member of the Firm we had really trusted, told the court that ‘it took eleven or twelve bullets to kill Frank Mitchell. I saw Freddie Foreman pump him full of bullets in a van in Barking.’ Donaghue also claimed we gave Freddie Foreman a thousand pounds for killing Frank - and he said he heard another man, Alfred Gerrard, say: ‘The bastard’s still alive. Give him another one, Fred.’ And that Jack Dickson said he’d heard three shots. And he claimed that I said to him: ‘He’s fucking dead. We had to get rid of him, he would have got us all into trouble.’

  In the end, no one was convicted of killing Frank Mitchell. Now no one ever will be. Because the feller who did it, Billy Exley, is dead himself. And the Greek fellers who did it with him are long gone. But Frank Mitchell is dead, I don’t doubt it. And, unfortunately for me and Reg, dead men can’t talk.

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Party’s Over …

  The beginning of the end for me and Reg probably started at Christmas 1967. We had a good Christmas but we didn’t realize that Nipper Read had been to see Billy Exley. Read was a superintendent working from the Murder Squad at the Yard. We knew about him but we never thought he was anything special. We still don’t.

  Exley, the man he saw, was an ex-boxer who did odd jobs for us. He wasn’t an important member of the Firm, but he knew bits and pieces. We know now that he and Read met at Exley’s little flat in Woodseer Street, in the East End although Exley wouldn’t come clean till later. In his book Read said: ‘Once Billy Exley began to talk to me, so many pieces of the jigsaw began to fall into place and I learned that Jack “the Hat” McVitie and Billy Exley were sent to shoot Payne.’

  During the first four months of 1968, Read and the policemen working with him - Frank Cater, Harry Mooney, Algie Hemmingway and Alan Wright - got at Liza, the nightclub hostess we’d paid to keep Frank Mitchell company at Lennie Dunn’s flat. She grassed and so did Dunn. Then they talked to the barmaid at the Blind Beggar and she named me as the man who shot George Cornell. It was all wrong. She didn’t pick me out at the identification parade after Cornell was shot. She walked straight past me. But she picked me out in the trial at the Old Bailey. That can’t be right. What’s the point of identification parades in the first place? If a witness can’t pick you out then, how can the same witness suddenly point you out in court months, years, later? I tried to say that in court, to say how unfair, how biased it was. But they whitewashed it all.

  They finally came for us on 8 May 1968. It’s funny, really, because after all the bad times I’d been through with my mental problems, I’d been starting to feel a lot better, much more like my old self. And Reg was in good form too. The night they came for us had been the kind of night we always enjoyed. A few drinks at the pub with some of the Firm, then up the West End for some action at the clubs. We went to the Astor Club, off Berkeley Square, and we sat there drinking and talking till the early hours. We never thought anything was up. We knew there were some plain-clothes detectives in the club, we could always spot them a mile off, but that was nothing unusual. They were always following us about. Me and Reg eventually left the Astor and drove back to a flat we owned at Braithwaite House, in Old Street. He was with a girl, I had a feller with me. We all had a nightcap and went to bed.

  We were all sound asleep when there was a hell of a commotion. I woke up to find my bed surrounded by police, some of them armed. They were led by Nipper Read and they’d smashed down the front door to get in. I noticed they were carrying .45 calibre Webley pistols and one of them was holding an iron bar. Read said to me: ‘You are under arrest. Get out of bed with your hands in the air.’ I was stark naked but that made no difference to them. Reg was brought into the room and Read said we were being charged with murder and other offences. He asked us if we’d got anything to say, and Reg said: ‘Yes, Mr Read. We’ve been expecting a frame-up for a long time, but we’ve got plenty of witnesses. There’s a lot of people wanting to help us.’

  At the time we believed that. We knew we had a bit of trouble here but we didn’t think it was anything we couldn’t handle. We’d been pulled in before and managed to sort it out. What we didn’t realize was that, while we were being arrested, squads of armed police were smashing down other doors all over the East End and pulling in anyone they could find. There was something like eighteen arrests that night, all carried out at the same moment. And all of those arrested were kept well apart, so that no one knew what was going on. They pulled in everyone that night except Scotch Jack Dickson and my right-hand man, Ian Barrie. They arrested Dickson a few hours later, and they picked up Barrie next day in a pub in the East End. We were all sent to different prisons and Read started to work on the weak ones, the liars, the traitors, the grasses. The ones he could do a deal with so they could save their own skins.

  By the middle of June we were getting whispers that the grassing had started. In his book Read says:

  I saw Cornelius Whitehead in the chapel at Wandsworth Prison on 22 June …

  The next day it was back to Wandsworth Prison, in the evening, to visit Tommy Cowley, who also wanted to see me. He had been charged with two cases of conspiracy to murder and with harbouring Frank Mitchell …

  Four days after that I had a message for Jock Ions that Scotch Jack Dickson had asked to see me. I saw him that evening in the chapel, in a meeting which lasted some twenty-five minutes, and ended with him saying: ‘For Christ’8 sake, don’t let anyone know that you’ve seen me.

  I’d be dead. You know that, being here.’ What he did not know was that he had become only one of a number who had the same fears …

  All through that long wet summer of ’sixty-eight, with me and Reg locked up in isolation, many members of our Firm turned Judas. Read would visit them in prison, using false names and often in disguise, and in the privacy of hospital rooms and chapels and toilets they would tell their stories. We knew that Albert Donaghue had had several sessions with Read, so had Dickson and Ronnie Hart, our cousin. Dickson was a disgrace. He even had the audacity to say in court: ‘The murders have got to stop. If Ronnie Kray had not been charged with Cornell’s murder there would have been two other murders that I know of that would have been committed.’ He also said: ‘Someone has got to have the guts to come forward to say their piece. You have got the three of them [me, Reg and our brother Charlie] in the dock, but I was not guilty.’

  Dickson was a rat. There is no other word for him. Eventually the trial got under way, and every day was like a fucking carnival as the prisoners were driven in from Brixton, Wands worth and other prisons. Me and Reg were driven in from Brixton, with a cavalcade of police and prison vehicles, flashing lights, wailing klaxons, armed police and commandos. Each day the route was changed, to avoid, they said, any attempt to hijack us. All the way in to the Old Bailey the route was lined with hundreds of people, many of them waving at us. No kidding, at times it was like the coronation. Or an execution.

  There were many charges against us, some of them quite stupid. They were just chucking everything at us, knowing that some of it would have to stick. It was pathetic - more than that, it was corrupt. As long as they could put us away for as long as possible, that was all they cared about. They charged me and Ian Barrie with the murder of George Cornell in the Blind Beggar. Barrie was one of the few members of the Firm to stay loyal. Ian Barrie was a real man. He remained loyal to us despite the tremendous pressures put on him by the police. His fellow Scot, Dickson, stood up in court and said he thought Barrie was wrong to stand in the dock ‘thinking it was big to be convicted with Ronnie Kray about a murder which he had known nothing about previously, and in which he had no concern’.

  Reg was charged with being an accessory to Cornell’s murder. Both of us, with Tony and Chris Lambrianou, Ron
Bender and Anthony Barry, the co-owner of the Regency club, were charged with the murder of Jack McVitie. Barry had not been present at the murder and was subsequently acquitted. He, too, gave evidence against us.

  Me and Reg and Tommy Cowley - one of the first of the traitors to ask to see Nipper Read - and our old friend Dickie Morgan were also charged with conspiring to kill a Maltese feller, George Caruana, between January and May 1968. This shows the depths to which the police were sinking to make sure something stuck against the Krays. They said we hired a feller called Paul Elvey to kill Caruana because he was trying to muscle in on our business. They claimed Elvey would have used either a crossbow or an explosive device to kill Caruana. The whole thing was nonsense. Me and Reg and Cowley were also charged with conspiring to murder an unnamed man in 1967, again using Paul Elvey as the hit man, only this time Elvey was to use a hypodermic syringe filled with poison and built into a suitcase. The prosecution claimed that the syringe was designed to work when the case was swung against the body of the intended victim. Death would be instant but would take the appearance of a heart attack. I had never heard anything like it.

  And the charges went on and on. I was charged with causing grievous bodily harm to a man at Esmerelda’s Bam. (The prosecution alleged that after he had upset a friend of ours, I invited him to the club and then placed a red-hot poker on his face and shoulders.)

  With Reg and our brother Charlie, I was charged with demanding money with menaces from two of our financial advisers who were now two of the prosecution’s chief witnesses, but who had in their time swindled thousands out of me and Reg.

  Me and Reg, with Connie Whitehead and Albert Donaghue, were charged with murdering Frank Mitchell. We were also charged with aiding Mitchell’s escape from Dartmoor. And there was a whole string of fraud charges as well. All in all, the police were determined they were going to get us on something! Defending us we had some top men: John Platts-Mills, QC, for me; Paul Wrightson, QC, for Reg; and Desmond Vowden, QC, for Charlie. On the opening day of the trial we got more media coverage than Earl Ray, the man who shot Martin Luther King and who had been arrested at London airport.