Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  The answer now seems obvious, although it can’t have been so obvious to Reg. The trouble was that he was still tightly locked in the same discordant-twin relationship with Ron that he had been in all his life and he could never break the pattern. And, at the same time, Violet was still acting as she always had. All she could think of was protecting her beloved Ronnie, although this meant that by doing so she was actually destroying Reggie.

  Finally Reg took Ron to a tame psychologist in Harley Street and told him that Ron was planning to get married. Since his fiancée’s parents had heard rumours of mental illness in his family he needed a doctor’s letter to reassure them all that he was sane. After a brief and expensive consultation the doctor was happy to oblige, and with the backing of the letter Ron was also happy to return to prison, finish his original sentence, and emerge free from any suggestion of insanity.

  The problem was getting Ron back to prison. It took Reg a long time to convince Violet that the time had come for Ron to surrender to the police, but he finally succeeded. Reg telephoned the local police station, and told an incredulous desk sergeant that his brother Ron Kray wanted to go back to prison. Having convinced him that it wasn’t some sort of joke, Reg then arranged an appointment for a police car to come to Vallance Road after Ron had had his dinner. Since Reg had put sleeping pills in Ron’s coffee, he went quietly.

  This prisoner serving a three-year sentence for a violent crime that had nearly killed a man was someone they had declared sane, but he was not just mildly schizophrenic. He was a paranoid schizophrenic – and he was highly dangerous. Between them, the doctors and the prison authorities had released on the public a homicidal schizophrenic. In addition, there was a further source of danger for one person in particular – for Reg himself.

  At the time it seemed inconceivable that the pathetic Ron could ever be a danger to anyone, least of all to his twin brother, especially as throughout Ron’s illness the power relationship between the Twins appeared to have been dramatically reversed and Reg was clearly in command. It was he who was making the decisions, he who was making all the money and who was very much in control of life. Ron, by contrast, totally depended on his brother to survive.

  Indeed, once Ron was back in prison the situation was tough on him, as the prison staff were not particularly understanding and Ron himself believed that he was cured. So did the family. He was weak, but with careful treatment he’d be fine. Doc Blasker would always be on hand to help if anything went wrong. And the family thanked God for Reg. Not only was he making money, the way he looked after Ron was wonderful. Reg had always been the strong one who could cope.

  But in the long term, none of this was going to matter for once again it was Ronnie’s weakness that would prove to be his greatest source of strength, and the more helpless and pathetic he became, the more Reg yielded to him; and somehow it was always Ron who ended up dictating what should happen, and Reg who ended up obeying. For Reg the real danger lay where it had lain since the Twins had emerged from their separate isolation hospitals at the age of three – in those unbreakable bonds that linked the two of them together. Had Reg been more self-aware, and more concerned about his own survival, he would have realised that, however mad he seemed, Ron would always find a way to reassert his domination and bring Reg under his control again. It might take time but, judging by what had happened in the past, it would be sure to happen once again.

  The problem was that if Reg failed to understand what was happening to his brother so did everybody else, including those psychiatrists who should have seen the danger. The severity of Ron’s mental state was always underestimated. He was regarded, if he was regarded at all, as a relatively mild schizophrenic who had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown from which he had more of less recovered, the breakdown mimicking the time when he had first pretended madness in the guardroom at Canterbury.

  The family too were in denial, having convinced themselves that Ron was simply ‘acting up’ again. For Violet to have admitted that her own beloved Ronnie, whom she had saved when he had so nearly died of diphtheria, was actually a lethal madman would have totally destroyed her. So, following the pattern that she adhered to all her life when faced with something unacceptable about her twins, she closed her mind to it, and shifted any blame there was onto others, particularly, of course, the family’s regular bêtes noires – the lawyers, the police and the prison authorities.

  But that was not the point. Far more serious was the failure of the doctors at the Long Grove mental hospital to understand Ron’s true mental condition. Even that was excusable: since Long Grove was an ordinary mental hospital, the doctors there had had little experience of criminals and diagnosed Ron as suffering from mild schizophrenia, which gave them little reason for alarm. According to a current psychiatric textbook, ‘schizophrenics are usually the least dangerous of all the mentally sick and the least likely to go in for violent crime. They usually have a low sex drive, and a low energy quotient in general’ – which, to judge by appearances, applied to Ron. The conclusion was brief and certainly not one to have given anyone concern. ‘A patient of poor intelligence, and little contact with reality.’

  What none of the doctors remembered, if they even knew about it at the time, was the existence of a small but separate group of schizophrenics known as paranoid schizophrenics, ‘which in certain cases can produce the most dangerous criminals of all’. According to the textbooks, symptoms could include violent mood swings – from grandiose illusions to black depression – hearing voices, compulsive aggression, flattening of the emotions and, in adulthood, actual physical change which could include putting on weight, deadening of the voice and a pronounced coarsening of the facial features.

  All of which was starting to apply with worrying precision to Ronnie. The truth was that his case had been misdiagnosed from the beginning. Far from being a harmlessly depressive schizophrenic with a low sex drive, he was in fact a paranoid schizophrenic and, potentially at least, a highly dangerous one. Certainly a disturbingly high proportion of the classic symptoms of schizophrenic paranoia applied with uncanny accuracy to him. He heard voices, he swung from highs of delusions of grandeur to lows of suicidal misery. He also swung rapidly between trust and irrational suspicion, and as his suspicions and fears of persecution mounted it would be only a matter of time before he became homicidal. With appropriate regular treatment his condition could have stabilised but this would have required expert and regular attention. With Ron there was not the faintest chance of this and, thanks to his erratic treatment by Doc Blasker, the family was able to convince themselves that Ron was cured when he wasn’t.

  With Reg so apparently successful, and Ron so pathetically in need of all the help that he could get, no one gave a thought to the dangers always lurking in their situation as discordant identical twins. But one of the reasons why a serious imbalance in a discordant-twin relationship so often brought disaster to them both, was because of their genetic similarities, which could not be changed and often made the weakness pass from one twin to the other.

  What was particularly dangerous in the Twins’ situation was that at this moment when the discordance in the relationship exploded due to Ronnie’s madness, what everybody noticed were the differences which were all too clear in the separate situations of the Twins. At the very moment when Ron was in the depths of degradation and despair, it must have seemed that Reg had broken free from him at last, particularly when with the passing of the weeks the imbalance between the two of them increased dramatically and it seemed that Reg, finally released from Ron’s irresistible twin demands, had started to enjoy his freedom for the first time in his life.

  Although everyone, Reg included, now seemed to think that he was in command, nothing had really changed. With all the wayward cunning of the madman that he was, Ron had been playing games like these to keep Reg under his control since they were children. Alarming though it was, his recent breakdown only raised the stakes by making Ron more dependent now
on Reg than ever.

  This meant that, as long as the bond between the twins endured, the discordant-twin relationship could reassert itself and reunite them. If this happened there would be no stopping them, and since Reg was identical to Ron, anything could happen. I remember talking to Reg about Ron’s first serious attack of madness in Camp Hill Prison, and him telling me how he experienced a sense of acute unease at precisely the same time, although nobody had told him that anything was wrong with Ron until much later.

  This meant that in the short term Reg was in command and was free to enjoy his apparent independence. But in the long term the prognosis was alarming. As long as Ron remained alive and active it was a virtual certainty that he would reassert his domination over Reg and end up making him as mad as he was. The facts of their discordant-twin birthright were unassailable and would prove too powerful for either of them to resist.

  10

  Esmeralda’s and After:

  1960–64

  THE 1960S STARTED well for the Twins. A few months earlier Reg had received an eighteenth-month prison sentence for demanding money with menaces. But there was such a strong suspicion that he had been framed by the police that in March 1960 he was released from Wandsworth pending his appeal. At the same time, Ron was beginning to cope with life and, thanks to his medication, was learning to live with his paranoia. But nonetheless the advance of his illness was beginning to change not only his appearance but his personality. The Twins’ passport photos taken at the end of 1959 still show them as virtually identical, but since then the physical coarsening had set in. Ron had put on weight, his voice had become increasingly expressionless, and something was happening around his eyes.

  Reg, in contrast with his brother, was in the best of spirits since leaving prison and was determined to exploit the opportunities of the new decade. For those with their wits about them, there had never been a better time to be a criminal – thanks largely to Parliament which was still debating what to do about the laws on gambling, some of which went back to the Middle Ages and most of which were unenforceable. So while the politicians went on arguing and the police gave up arresting people for illicit gambling, so many casinos and gaming clubs were springing up that London was getting known as the gambling capital of Europe.

  During the late 1950s, the Twins had prospered from ‘protecting’ semi-legal gaming parties in Belgravia hosted by the gambling king of London at the time, John Aspinall. Reg was missing club life more than ever now and, remembering those parties, he was on the lookout for an upmarket gaming club of his own when someone mentioned Esmeralda’s Barn.

  Esmeralda’s Barn has long since vanished from the ever-changing face of London, its premises demolished and its site in Knightsbridge now occupied by the unlovely bulk of the Berkeley Hotel. But the Barn used to be above a row of shops in fashionable Wilton Place and it was here that it began as a nightclub on London’s debutante circuit in the 1950s, with soft lights, sweet music and a resident singer called Cy Grant.

  Then, as the 1950s ended, a bright young man called Stefan de Faye took the club over and turned it into one of the West End’s first legitimate casinos, with a bar, a dining room, roulette, and three full-sale tables for chemmy. Soon Alf Mancini, one of London’s smartest gambling club managers, joined de Faye as co-director and it seemed that they could not go wrong. But in the hungry world of early 1960s London it was unwise to overreach yourself and, although he didn’t know it yet, Stefan de Faye was in danger of becoming too successful.

  It was always said that the Notting Hill property mogul Peter Rachman tipped the Twins off about the Barn in order to repay a favour. But more important was the fact that Billy Hill, who was rapidly becoming one of London’s richest criminals, also encouraged them to go for it.

  It would be unfair to Billy Hill to ascribe his attitude towards the Twins to fellow feeling for a pair of up-and-coming youngsters, still less to kindness or warm-heartedness. Mr Hill had given up on kindness and warm-heartedness many years before. As for encouraging young talent, after seventeen years in Her Majesty’s prisons, forget it. The only motive Billy ever had was to do whatever suited Billy Hill. And it suited him to have the Kray Twins safely tucked away in Esmeralda’s Barn to divert them from the richer pickings he was busily exploiting on the gambling scene of Mayfair and Belgravia.

  Hill had changed a lot since the days of the billiard hall, when the Twins had first met him and refused to back him in his fight against Jack Spot. Sensing the new possibilities in London, he had reinvented himself as a big-time criminal tycoon. He had already masterminded the KLM gold job, eighteen months before, followed by a quarter-million-pound mailbag robbery, and apart from crime, he was now en route to becoming a multimillionaire from the profits of gambling, property and a large-scale demolition company. He spent part of every year in Morocco, supervising his narcotics business from Tangier to London, and as a one-time burglar he enjoyed the luxury of his burglar-proof flat in Bayswater, opposite the Greek cathedral. From here he directed his criminal affairs like the chairman of a major multinational and it was this that made him keen to have the Twins on board. For Billy Hill was not naive, and he knew that the richer he became, the more vulnerable he’d be to violence. In London gang warfare was increasing but at the age of forty-nine Billy Hill had had enough of it to last a lifetime. Others could fight his battles for him now. Who better than the Krays?

  Even with Billy Hill to back them it was unlikely that the Twins could have ever taken over Esmeralda’s Barn. They would have started by threatening the owner, beaten up a croupier or two, then caused disturbances to interrupt the gambling. Ron was good at creating disturbances, and in the end it might have worked. On the other hand it might not. Stefan de Faye was no pushover and he would almost certainly have asked for police protection and toughed it out. All of which would have taken time and scared off the punters – and the Twins might well have found themselves back in prison, which was something that they seriously didn’t want. To avoid this happening, they turned to one of the finest fraudsters in the country for assistance.

  Leslie Payne was one of a new breed of high-powered con men who suddenly appeared in London in the 1960s. The son of an ex-solicitor, he was a big good-looking fair-haired man who would have had little difficulty making an honest living had he wished but who had long ago decided not to. His trademark was a casually tied polka-dot blue bow tie which, when combined with an equally casual lightweight suit, distinguished him from the other shady characters around him. Widely known as ‘Payne the Brain’ or ‘the Man with the Briefcase’, he was, as I wrote about him once, ‘so plausible and so stylishly dishonest that I took him for an Old Etonian.’

  He was also one of the few people round the Twins who had experienced violence on a scale that none of them had ever known – as an infantry sergeant in the war in Italy at the battle of Cassino. ‘After that’, he said, ‘it was hard to take the hangers-on around the Twins too seriously.’

  But Payne was never one to underestimate the Twins themselves, and he was interested in them for the same reason as Billy Hill was – he wanted the right to use the name of Kray to scare off any other hungry villains who felt like preying on his long-firm frauds.

  The theory of the long-firm fraud was simple and probably started with the Ancient Greeks. It involved buying up large quantities of goods on credit, selling them off for cash as cheaply and as fast as possible, and then disappearing with the money. End of story. But there were endless variations on the way it worked, and with his ingenuity and the assistance of his partner, a mousy-looking ex-accountant called Freddy Gore, Leslie Payne had started raking in extraordinary amounts of money. But however smart you were – and Payne and Gore were very smart – there was always the chance of something going wrong. The fall guy you had paid to take the blame might go back on the agreement. Somebody might grass you to the police. Someone might even try to take your operation over.

  Such things, alas, could happen, and when they
did it was good to have someone on your side with a reputation that everybody feared. Which was why Les Payne had got to know the Twins. As he put it, ‘when it came to organised, effective violence, they were quite simply the best in the business.’

  In return the Twins asked Leslie Payne to help them hijack Esmeralda’s Barn, which he did so skilfully that it was like having teeth extracted by a painless dentist. Stefan de Faye barely knew what had happened to his club until he lost it.

  Payne began by renting an impressive office just behind the Albert Hall for a few days. Then he rang de Faye out of the blue, inviting him to call one evening at his office to discuss an interesting business proposition. Payne took a lot of trouble with his business propositions, which was why de Faye, who was not a stupid man, accepted. The address was reassuring and Leslie Payne sounded almost reassuring too. But all this ended when de Faye entered Payne’s office and came face to face with the Twins.

  It was not that they said or did anything, threatening or otherwise. They were dressed in their dark blue suits in honour of the occasion and all they did was sit silently for the next half-hour while Payne did all the talking. De Faye was not permitted to say much either, as Payne spelled out certain facts about the ownership of Esmeralda’s Barn that he had recently discovered. Unlike most con-men’s patter, every statement in Leslie Payne’s account was true.

  He started with the Barn’s monthly earnings. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but during the last three months your total income from the gambling averaged £7,250 a month.’

  Despite himself, de Faye could only nod.

  ‘You are also one of four principal investors who are drawing money from the club but final control is vested in a holding company called Hotel Organisation Ltd. Again, correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand that Hotel Organisation Ltd is you, and you alone.’