Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  Once again de Faye nodded.

  ‘What exactly do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘My friends and I wish to purchase Hotel Organisation Ltd. And we are offering you a thousand pounds. My lawyer has already drawn up an agreement and I have it here for you to sign. You and your other three directors will keep your places on the board of Esmeralda’s Barn. You will simply be relieved of all the worries you must have, running such a vulnerable club as this.’

  ‘Worries? But I have no worries,’ said de Faye.

  Instead of answering, Payne turned his gaze upon the Twins who stared back at Stefan de Faye.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Leslie Payne. ‘To be honest, were I in your position I would take the offer while you have the chance.’

  De Faye still tried to argue but there was something about the presence of the Twins that made argument pointless and he finally did as Leslie Payne suggested. Stefan de Faye was never to set foot in Esmeralda’s Barn again.

  What was unusual about Esmeralda’s Barn was its perfection. Thanks to de Faye and Alf Mancini it made money like a dream, and there was nothing for the Twins to do except enjoy it. With Mancini in charge to supervise the gambling and Payne around to keep an eye on business, the Twins had no need to do anything at all.

  Throughout the 1960s, London’s gamblers were going chemmy mad. Unlike baccarat, that old favourite of the gambling classes in which the house retained the bank (and the profits), in chemmy the bank was passed around the players. (Hence its full name, chemin de fer, French for ‘railway’.) Because of this it was generally believed that chemmy was the nearest one could get to a game of pure chance and – at least in theory – the odds were equalised between the players and the house.

  But this overlooked the fact that in every game the players contributed what was known as the cagnotte. This was between seven and eight per cent of the money on the table and it was taken by the house. Since at Esmeralda’s Barn the Twins and Leslie Payne were the house, every penny of the cagnotte went to them. So one can understand why Payne advised the Twins, whatever the temptation, never to interfere with such a fool-proof way of making money.

  This suited Reg, who was increasingly busy now with his various protection rackets and the complicated long-firm frauds that he was running in partnership with Payne. In many ways Reg was not unlike his father, old Charlie Kray – a smart old-fashioned trickster who was keen to get his hands on any racket going. Given the chance, Reg could be extremely sharp, and he was particularly grateful to Billy Hill who had finally decided to ‘educate’ him about the various criminal possibilities emerging in the 1960s.

  Many years later, in a deathbed interview, Reg paid Billy Hill the ultimate old lag’s tribute by calling him ‘my mentor’. But back then Reg was also learning fast from Leslie Payne, and compared with the money that the Twins were making from these other rackets Esmeralda’s Barn was something of a side-show. During the first six months of 1960, their joint income with Leslie Payne from the long-firm frauds alone topped fifty thousand pounds, which in those days was a lot of money. The Twins took half of this, whereas at Esmeralda’s Barn their weekly take was rarely more than £800 apiece. But then, it called for little effort.

  Besides, for Reg, the fact that he and Ron were now owners of the club meant a lot to him. After so many setbacks in the past he was finally in the sort of West End club he’d dreamed of and, like many ambitious young East Enders in the 1960s, he felt that he had at last crossed the line between the old East End and the tempting pastures of the golden West.

  Soon he was proudly inviting several of the celebrities he’d known at The Double R and the Kentucky to the Barn, and was in danger of becoming something of a celebrity himself. He’d already had dark blue dinner jackets made for himself and Ron, and he loved to play host to the Barn’s rich clientele. On one gala evening Judy Garland came, while more frequent visitors included the singer Lita Rosa, a new young star called Barbara Windsor, and the blonde bombshell Diana Dors. Reg was in his element at last – but Ron was different.

  During those early days at Esmeralda’s Barn, Ron always seemed to be the odd man out. By completing his prison sentence in Wandsworth Prison he had done all that the law required of him to ‘prove’ his sanity. But although Doc Blasker was still trying to stabilise him with pills, this was not the same as being cured and whatever the law might say about his sanity there would never be a cure for his condition.

  In contrast with the young and still handsome Reg, Ron in his dark blue dinner jacket looked increasingly like Dracula on a bad night out. Sometimes he even scared himself when he glanced in the mirror and saw the thickening features, the extra weight and something very odd about the eyes. The truth was that he was beginning to look like what he really was – a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic.

  Throughout all this, one person in the Twins’ small circle was totally oblivious to what was happening to Ron: his mother, Violet. During the early days at the club the Twins occasionally invited her for dinner, and after such occasions there was no prouder mother in the whole of Bethnal Green. Vi had always stood loyally by her Twins whatever happened and was thrilled to see them so successful. To please her, Reg always did his best to be patient with his brother, which wasn’t easy.

  To be fair to Violet, she was always grateful. But there was one thing that she wouldn’t tolerate – any suggestion now that Ron was mad. Mad? Her Ronnie? How could anyone say such a thing, after all he’d suffered?

  Because Violet felt so strongly on the subject the rest of the family had to follow her example; as did the members of the Firm, for whom Ron’s mental health became a virtual test of loyalty. There was nothing wrong with Ron that time and kindness wouldn’t cure, said Violet. Reg dutifully agreed and told himself that the more contact his brother had with ordinary people, the more he’d pull himself together and start to cure himself. Which to a point was true – but only to a point.

  In fact the gap between the Twins was widening. Reg was more than ever now the live wire, the close friend of the stars, and the serious earner of the two. Reg was clearly going places. As for Ron, for most of the time he seemed to be living in a daze created by his sickness or his medication.

  Then suddenly the situation changed, thanks to one of those twisted bits of luck which dominate the lives of criminals. Reg’s appeal against his sentence was unexpectedly rejected, and back he went to Wandsworth Jail. In Reg’s absence, Ron took over Esmeralda’s Barn.

  With hindsight one can see this as a crucial moment in the lives not only of the Twins but also of others in close contact with them. Indeed, it could be argued that the next six months with Ron in charge of Esmeralda’s Barn would see the start of something new and virtually unheard of in the world of crime in 1960s London.

  To begin with, when he found himself in charge of Esmeralda’s Barn Ron acted like a child who finds a magic money box and sets off on a spending spree. In the cashier’s office there could be such large amounts of money that Ron found them irresistible and he started on a voyage of personal discovery round the rich West End of London.

  He began in Savile Row by ordering several suits from one of the most expensive tailors in London. In Jermyn Street he discovered the shirt makers Turnbull and Asser, and ordered several dozen shirts from them as well. Then, finally, just around the corner from the Barn he found Harrods – not today’s glorified shopping mall but the old Harrods, which still prided itself on getting anything its customers desired.

  Remembering the success of his donkey at the billiard hall, Ron decided he would buy an elephant from the pet department1 saying he wanted it to liven up the Barn. When someone told him that an elephant wouldn’t go up the stairs, he bought a chimpanzee instead and ordered Turnbull and Asser to make the primate a dress shirt and a black bow tie. Then he brought his well-dressed chimpanzee to the Barn where he sat him down among what he saw as all the other monkeys trying their luck around the chemmy tables. When his monkey won he in
sisted that he was paid his winnings.

  Say what you like about old Ron but there were times when he really was a joker.

  With so much money coming in, Ron should have been free from all financial worries. But in fact it was now his attitude to money that landed him in trouble.

  Since gambling clubs are legally obliged to pay winnings on the spot, in order to survive, most clubs insist that gamblers also pay their losses straight away; for once dud cheques start piling up it’s usually a sign of a gaming club that’s on the road to ruin. One of the reasons for Alf Mancini’s continuing success was that he never offered credit to even the most favoured punters.

  But here, as usual, Ron was different. Apart from treating Esmeralda’s as his private money box, he also started offering friends and fellow criminals endless credit, encouraged them to over-spend, and then enjoyed putting the squeeze on anyone with money. During his first month on his own Ron landed the club with debts of £1,500; by the second month they had reached £3,500; and by the end of the third month Mancini had offered Ron £1,000 a week to stay away. When Ron told him to get lost, Mancini understood that the time had come to follow Ron’s advice himself. Within a few weeks he was running another gaming club in Curzon Street; within a year he owned the place.

  Mancini’s departure brought an instant dip in the profits at the Barn. Most of Mancini’s regulars were in the restaurant business and had been coming to Esmeralda’s since the club began. They gambled heavily, drank sparingly, and always paid their debts; but when Alf Mancini left most of them went with him.

  Ron barely seemed to notice. If the club was getting into debt, so what? He liked to think that people were grateful to him for his generosity, although what he really liked was to put the fear of God into those who couldn’t pay. He rarely used violence on them but he loved tormenting them and sometimes sent members of ‘the Firm’ to call on them at home. In spite of which the club began to grow and the membership began to change. So did Ron, who was about to experience something of a personal revelation.

  In the basement under Esmeralda’s a girl called Ginette had recently opened a lesbian disco called the Cellar Club, which became a free and easy meeting place for gays of every sexual inclination. As a serious male chauvinist, Ron had always said that he hated lesbians. But Ginette was an exception and when he started visiting her club he discovered something that surprised him. None of its members seemed to feel the slightest sense of shame at being homosexual.

  Soon in the the Cellar Club he started meeting other gays who, far from disguising their sexuality, obviously enjoyed it. When Ron saw some who even dared to flaunt their nature, he realised that being gay could actually be fun and he started to enjoy it too. Then, finally, he plucked up courage and decided it was time to emerge from the closet.

  Ron was far too square ever to be considered camp and he hated effeminacy in men as much as he hated it in women. He also made it clear exactly what he was. In gay parlance Ron was a ‘giver’, not a ‘taker’. ‘I’m not queer,’ he used to say. ‘I’m ‘omosexual’. And from then on, as far as he was concerned, in matters sexual that was that.

  But for Ron this change of attitude had one all-important side effect. With the awareness that his sexuality was no longer any cause for personal embarrassment came a rapid increase in self-confidence, and along with gay liberation much of the sense of class inferiority that had always bothered him began to disappear as well.

  Interestingly, it was the opening of the Cellar Club in the basement under Esmeralda’s Barn that helped to bring about a change in the Barn’s membership as more ‘playboy gamblers’ took the place of the restaurateurs and head waiters who had left the club along with Alf Mancini. Some of the newcomers were gay, some weren’t, and some were not particularly concerned about what they were. But since since this was the Swinging Sixties none of this seemed to matter very much at Esmeralda’s Barn.

  Certainly Ron felt more at ease among them than he had with Alf Mancini’s friends and for the first time he began to feel at ease in the club that, partially at least, belonged to him. It was now, with Reg away, that he started to use it rather as he used the old billiard hall in Eric Street. Not only did he make the Barn his headquarters but at times he used it as his personal theatre to perform in front of the members who became a sort of captive audience. It was now, as Aunt Rose used to say, that ‘Ronnie started acting up.’

  By its nature big-time crime is silent crime, and the criminal tycoons of the 1960s, like Billy Hill, the Adams brothers and the Richardsons trod softly and had no desire to advertise their business or themselves. Even the elusive Freddy Foreman, whose criminal empire was beginning to rival Billy Hill’s, never courted personal publicity.

  Characters like these were as much a part of the enterprise culture of the 1960s as any takeover tycoon or merchant banker. Like them, they were primarily concerned with money, and like them they conducted their activities with considerable discretion. Ronnie could not have been more different.

  The Twins patterned themselves on the old-style villains of the past whose legends they had grown up with. This specially applied to Ronnie, and the more publicity he got, the better.

  With Ron it was partly due to the necessity of feeling ‘special’ – and partly to the dominating influence of his paranoid nature. Driven by its overwhelming mood swings, and depending on his mood, Ron could play many parts. His appearance helped. It was the criminologist Dick Hebdidge who first called him an ‘actor criminal’.

  This did not mean that they weren’t also real criminals, and didn’t do appalling things. Of course, as we have seen already, Reg, like his mentor Billy Hill, was seriously into making money and was already a successful organising criminal. He was also in close contact with the American Mafia.

  But in the early 1960s, as organised crime increased, there was a vacancy for somebody to be the public face of villainy. This showed in the way most fascinating creations of thriller writers like Ian Fleming were their villains. Monsters were suddenly in vogue, but they had no real-life equivalent, and it wasn’t what you were but what people thought you were that mattered.

  How much was gossip, how much was grim reality didn’t really matter very much. What did matter was the growing impression created in the minds of those who came in contact with them that the Twins were the most powerful and ruthless criminals in London. It was at Esmeralda’s Barn that London found the monster it was seeking.

  First, of course, came Ron’s appearance. He really could look very frightening. Indeed one of his most bankable assets as a real-life villain was that he looked like a murderer several years before he actually murdered anyone.

  It also helped that he had episodes of real madness and that his moods depended largely on whether Doc Blasker’s pills were working. This made him irrational and unpredictable and potentially extremely dangerous, which all added to his legend.

  With Reggie still ‘away’ Ron was at liberty to turn the Barn into what he’d always wanted – a richer, more accommodating version of the old billiard hall. Here chemmy could take the place of snooker to provide the necessary background, and for Ron and any friends he invited food and drink were on the house.

  When in the right mood Ron would put on an unforgettable performance with a sudden demonstration of his lethal virtuosity. All the stories being told about the Twins concerned violence and the fear of violence. One vicim who had ‘taken the liberty’ of beating up the son of an old friend of the Twins (and should obviously have known better) needed to be taught a lesson, which Ron did by taking him into the kitchen when Esmeralda’s Barn was closed, heating up a steel knife-sharpener on the gas and branding him with it on the cheek.

  It was also true that Ron had ‘disciplined’ another villain who had unwisely told him that he had put on weight by taking him into the washroom at the club and slashing off half his face.

  At a club as respectable as Esmeralda’s Barn a little violence went a long way.

 
; There were also incidents of mayhem and skulduggery at the club that lost nothing in the telling, and other stories that originated in the minds of some of Esmeralda’s clientele. I don’t believe, for instance, that as legend had it, Ron imprisoned somebody all night with a hungry Dobermann – ‘to teach him a lesson’. Still less do I believe the story that he anally assaulted an accountant with a red-hot poker.

  But the best stories were the ones that only Ron himself could have invented, and by the time that Reg returned from prison late that summer, he could see that Ron had changed.

  Reg made light of Mancini’s departure, nor did he mention the pile of dishonoured cheques in the secretary’s office. That was Ron all over, and as long as he was happy and Violet was pleased that was all that mattered. But one thing troubled Reg. After his absence, not only did the club feel different, with its changing clientele, but no one took much notice of him any more. It was Ron they wanted, Ron that people talked about, and Ron who seemed to rule the roost.

  Although this rankled, Reg had other things to think about while Ron was still enjoying the company of his gay friends in the Cellar Club downstairs. Cannier and warier, Reg kept his sexuality to himself and had openly started courting pretty Frances Shea, the teenage sister of a boy that Ron had once fancied. And while he was in prison Reg had started dreaming of life with her in the distant future with marriage, children and a settled home life. This would mean, of course, that he would have to break from Ronnie, which he longed for all the more because he knew it was impossible.

  With his telepathic way of knowing what Reg was thinking, Ron knew exactly what was going through his mind but didn’t worry. He knew that Reg could never get away from him. He was Reg and Reg was him – and that was all that mattered.

  One gets a clear idea of how Ron’s power was growing from the painter Francis Bacon who met the Twins together in Morocco early in 1962 when they were in Tangier as guests of Billy Hill. Hill had business interests that he wanted to discuss with them, principally protecting his highly profitable trade in hashish and heroin against the threat of the American Mafia in Europe, as well as from the criminal element in Tangier itself. Reg was interested and promised Hill that he would help, but whenever Ron was in Morocco he was interested in one thing and one thing alone – the local boys. When he had visited Tangier back in 1959 – he’d said that he found them ‘unbelievable’.