Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  And what about Lord Robert Graham Boothby who, after all, had been the man that all the fuss had been about?

  One can’t disguise the fact that he did very well indeed. Nearly a million pounds in today’s money was not a bad reward for mendacity and rough-trade sex – although, as we shall see, there wasn’t all that much of the money left by the time the Krays had got their hands on it.

  And what about the losers? First, of course, comes Cecil Harmsworth King who bore the disaster bravely as he signed the £40,000 cheque for Robert Boothby, ‘thereby proving’, as Randolph Churchill pointed out, ‘that he was not the master in his own house’. A point made more cruelly eighteen months later when Cudlipp displaced him from his chairmanship of IPC and got that precious peerage that had been the cause of so much trouble.

  There were some other losers too, but not among Top People, still less among the Great and the Good. Reg Payne, nominally the editor of the Sunday Mirror at the time of the affair, had played little part in the disaster, but since he was unimportant and someone had to take the blame he was sacrificed. No longer the editor of the Sunday Mirror he was made editor of IPC’s downmarket magazine Tit-Bits. And, inevitably, there were some East End criminals who would lose their lives – once Ron got going. George Cornell, Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, the ‘Mad Axeman’ Frank Mitchell and, although few know about it, Driberg’s boyfriend Teddy Smith would all get their comeuppance in the fallout from the scandal.

  Because of all this the Boothby case must count as the cause célèbre of the Sixties, an all but unbelievable and still largely unacknowledged secret scandal that dwarfs the other scandals of the time for the number of top people who were involved, for the extent of the involvement of politicians with known criminals, and for the cynicism with which it was so neatly brushed beneath the carpets of both Houses of Parliament – not to mention, of course, the people who were subsequently murdered, and the cost in time and money spent on bringing their murderers to so-called justice.

  But the most extraordinary thing about the scandal was, as we shall see, the way in which, over the next three years, the cover-up would make the Twins ‘the untouchables’ of the underworld and in the process turned them into the mythical monsters who still haunt us.

  13

  Blackmail: 1964–65

  IT WASN’T LONG before the Twins were enjoying the first fruits of the hushed-up scandal. By getting Boothby forty thousand pounds for perjuring himself in public Lord Goodman had made him vulnerable to anybody who could prove that he was lying – which, life being what it was, meant Ronnie Kray. Had there been any argument there were the contents of the small brown suitcase that Ron had deposited with his mother, comprising various photographs including those taken in his flat and at the Society Restaurant, a personally inscribed copy of Lord Boothby’s memoirs and, most damaging of all, a number of handwritten letters to Ron from Boothby on his crested paper, some of them dating back to long before Ron’s first visit to his flat and all of which proved conclusively that Boothby, in the famous phrase of a former Secretary to the Cabinet, had been ‘somewhat economical with the truth’ and his friendship with the King of the Underworld was far more extensive than those three brief business meetings on which he had staked his reputation in his letter to The Times.

  The little brown suitcase was Ron’s weapon of last resort but at the moment he had no need to use it. The truth was, of course, that Boothby was scared to death of Ronnie Kray. For those unacquainted with the sadder facts of life, this is what so-called rough-trade sex is all about – fear as a sexual switch-on, violence as an aphrodisiac, brutality and domination at the service of the addict’s sexual pleasure. In the words of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the Austrian novelist who gave his name to this condition: ‘Show me a sadist and I’ll show you a masochist.’ Ron had been the sadist while Boothby and the members of their circle had been the masochists.

  Make no mistake, Ronnie could be seriously scary, particularly when he hadn’t had his Stematol and what it was like for idiots like Boothby playing masochistic sex games with a potential murderer like Ronnie Kray, I still don’t care to think.

  As far as the situation between him and Boothby was concerned, by early that autumn one thing was crystal-clear. All Ronnie had to do was say the word and Boothby would jump. At present there was no need for Ron to do this but should the need have arisen, all he would have had to do would be to be to put the squeeze on him for what he rightly saw as his fair share of the money from the Sunday Mirror.

  At least Boothby had the decency to say that he regarded those forty thousand pounds as ‘tainted money’. But he was always curiously vague about what he actually did with a sum which, in today’s debased currency, would have fallen not far short of a million pounds.

  Apart from telling Driberg that he’d bought himself a house in France (which Driberg apparently could never find) the old fabulist mentioned a number of other possible recipients – including Sister Agnes Hospital, ‘in gratitude for having saved my life’, the British Heart Foundation, and trusts that he supposedly set up for various unnamed godchildren. Perhaps some of them did receive something but that didn’t stop most of the ‘tainted money’ ending up with the Krays. Their attitude to tainted money was like that of the Roman Emperor Vespasian who, on picking out a coin from the imperial privy, said, ‘Non odet pecunia’ – money doesn’t stink. When it came to money, Ronnie felt the same.

  As far as I could discover, no sooner had the bank cleared the Sunday Mirror cheque than Boothby sent Ron £5,000 – which in the circumstances was sensible, if only to keep him sweet and pay the costs of the libel case which he was just about to launch against the Sunday Mirror. It would seem to follow that since Cecil King had now apologised to Ron for calling him ‘a homosexual thug’ he had ipso facto, libelled him as well, but the judge felt otherwise and dismissed the case on the grounds of fair comment. This would always be a sore point with Ron. ‘Proves what I always said. One law for the fucking rich, and another for the poor,’ an observation so obvious that it hardly needed Ronald Kray to make it.

  This was, however, only the beginning of the Kray Twins’ squeeze on the highly squeezable Lord Boothby. For, as it happened, by that autumn they were going through a cashflow problem. Thanks to Ron’s habit of using Esmeralda’s Barn as his personal money box the club that should have been a small gold mine for the Twins was going broke. To save the day Reg installed the Twins’ uncle, old Charlie’s brother Alf, as manager. But Uncle Alf was not John Aspinall, bills continued to pile up unpaid, and soon the bailiffs were fixing padlocks on the doors.

  Realistically, the Twins should not have let this bother them unduly. They had wisely continued to keep clear of banks, insisting that whatever they were owed from protection rackets, rents and profits from their long-firm frauds and associated scams, was handed over weekly and in cash. Ron kept the details in his spidery writing in a small black book, and he and Reggie shared the proceeds. The only trouble was that Ron had been in the habit of treating the money from the Barn as his and when it stopped he began to feel the pinch. He was always more extravagant than Reg (who, truth be told, was rather mean) and large sums now began to disappear on clothes and jewellery and boys – especially boys – who knew that they could always earn themselves a gold bracelet or even a diamond-studded watch if they were suitably inventive.

  Now that the gold mine of the Barn had disappeared the Twins’ largest source of income was the Mafia-owned Colony Sporting Club in Mayfair which, according to Les Payne, was still paying them £500 a week in protection money alone. It wasn’t extortionate, but it was regular, and there were many other gambling and illicit drinking clubs across London making regular contributions to the Twins. These were mainly Reg’s concern. Unlike Ron he was methodical, and it was thanks to Reg that the business side of the Firm went on ticking over so profitably. But this didn’t suit Ron who was attracted by the bigger picture. Now that the Barn had gone he wanted something that would take
its place and bring in real money. That autumn he set out to find it.

  Ever since those early evenings in the billiard hall when he had played the part of the boss among his underlings Ron had continued his obsession with the American Mafia. In the early 1960s, when Castro kicked the Mob out of Cuba and they started seriously investing in gambling in London, the Twins had met several major figures in the Mafia, such as Dino Cellini and Angelo Bruno, and above all the hyper-rich boss of bosses Meyer Lansky. For many years Lansky controlled most of the gambling in Las Vegas, and was currently in London. He regarded London, unlike Vegas now, as a source of endless possibilities for organised crime, gambling and large-scale trafficking in drugs.

  When he was setting up the plush Colony Sporting Club in Mayfair as his London showplace Lansky installed the actor George Raft, star of many forgettable gangster B-movies, to front this extremely lucrative operation and the Twins soon got to meet him. In a way they felt that they already knew him – from all his early movies, especially Scarface, the 1932 film that made his name. It was Scarface that had brought him to the attention of big-time mafiosi such as Lansky, who employed Raft in the part he played so often in his films – as the public face of the Mafia in their top casinos.

  After 1966, when the Home Office would make him a scapegoat for the Mob in London and sling him out of Britain, Raft would recall his years in London as the happiest of his life. ‘I had a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, I had a penthouse apartment in Mayfair, and I had beautiful women with me every night.’ He also had the Krays to guarantee the Colony Sporting Club ‘protection’ and make sure that nothing untoward upset his plans for highly profitable gambling ‘junkets’ when groups of rich punters were specially flown in to London from America.

  But by that autumn Ron was getting bored with this arrangement and, knowing that the Mafia was planning to extend its activities in London to a range of crimes including trafficking in stolen securities, drug dealing and money laundering, he felt the time had come to assert what he felt should be the Twins’ rightful share of the action. Reg said he’d talk this over with George Raft. Ron angrily (and truthfully) insisted that Raft had no authority and that this was the moment to be tough and up the ante. Reg passed the gist of this to Raft, knowing that he in turn would pass it on to Lansky who was now in America – which he did.

  Lansky was surprisingly accommodating. ‘Invite the boys over. Let’s discuss this face to face,’ was his reaction. Reg made it clear that he wasn’t going to America, saying he didn’t want trouble with the FBI,which made Ron decide immediately that he was going.

  I was always puzzled over how Ron got his US visa. Perhaps he just got lucky, and the US Consul in London, Ray E. White Jr, hadn’t been paying enough attention to the British press. Otherwise he was hardly likely to have granted the recently proclaimed King of the London Underworld unlimited access to America. At all events, on 16 October 1964 Ronald Kray – occupation: ‘General Dealer’ – got his tourist visa for as many visits to the USA as he cared to make, up to and including 16 October 1968. Since Ronnie wasn’t one for wasting time he took advantage of his luck and booked a New York flight for early that November.

  Boothby meanwhile was not as happy as he might have been, considering the scandal and the depths of unplumbed misery that he had so narrowly avoided. And that autumn, when Boothby’s ‘Little Man’, the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, duly became prime minister, this should have led to what would probably have been the proudest moment of his lordship’s life.

  Long before the trouble started with the Sunday Mirror one of Boothby’s oldest friends, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Patrick Gordon Walker, had suggested him to Harold Wilson as an ideal choice for Labour’s next ambassador to France and Wilson had seen the point. As a popular celebrity politician, with cross-party appeal and a reputation for independence, Boothby would have been the sort of maverick appointment that Wilson wanted for his new regime, signalling the end of the stuffy image of the previous government. This was how things stood when Labour was returned to power and the London Evening Standard broke the news a few days later that Boothby was about to be Britain’s next ambassador in Paris.

  What followed then was fascinating. Had everything been as it should have been if Boothby really had been innocent of any involvement with the Krays nothing would have changed. He had been vindicated thanks to Arnold Goodman, the Sunday Mirror accusations had been exposed as a ‘tissue of atrocious lies’ and there was no earthly reason why the new prime minister should not have happily confirmed Lord Boothby’s long-awaited elevation as Britain’s man in Paris.

  But this didn’t happen and the fact that it didn’t rather gives the game away. Now that we know the truth, and since many members of the Establishment, including Harold Wilson and his close advisers, unquestionably knew it too, it is obvious that there was actually no way that popular Lord Boothby could ever have been appointed to anything. However brilliantly Arnold Goodman had seen off the Sunday Mirror, no politician or senior civil servant with the remotest contact with reality would have dreamt of risking his career by backing Boothby for a five-pound loan, let alone to an ambassadorship as sensitive as that of Paris. The thought of the Kray Twins at some later date blackmailing Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Paris has a certain wild appeal but is also quite disturbing.

  However, just as the Establishment had saved Boothby for reasons of its own, so it was now dropping him as fast as possible – because it had to. Lady Luck had done enough for Robert Boothby and as a lifelong gambler he knew better than to push her any further. As a gambler he also knew the meaning of the phrase ‘a busted flush’. His usefulness to anyone except the Krays was over.

  In the Public Record Office there is a letter that he wrote to Harold Wilson, which in the circumstances is so rich in irony and reveals so much about the man who wrote it that it’s worth quoting.

  ‘My Dear Prime Minister,

  I am down with bronchitis for the fifth year running and my doctor says it is no longer funny. He added yesterday that although there is no immediate reason for alarm, if it continues it can be a killer. He has therefore ordered me to the Caribbean for a minimum period of two months, and I am leaving for Barbados next week. In many ways it is a great relief.

  One final word, if I may. If it is not an impertinence for me to say so, after forty years of unbroken public service in parliament I have not got what I ought to have. This, I know, means little or nothing to the public. But if, at any time, you could see your way to put it right, it would give very great satisfaction to,

  Yours very sincerely,

  Bob Boothby

  As with his letter to Macmillan asking for his peerage, one can only marvel at Boothby’s extraordinary effrontery and wonder just what further honours he may have thought he ‘ought to have’. Having already picked up a peerage and a KBE, it left only the Companionship of Honour, the Order of Merit and the Order of the Garter, any one of which in the circumstances might have seemed a touch excessive. Certainly, Harold Wilson and his government had clearly had enough of him by now, and whatever honour Boothby might have thought that he deserved was not forthcoming.

  As for the talk about bronchitis, like so many of his utterances this was only partly true. For him the real relief and the reason he was leaving London for Barbados was not in obedience to his doctor but to take a break from Ronald Kray, whose demands were now becoming increasingly insistent.

  While Boothby and the faithful Goodfellow were preparing to exchange the fog of London for the warm sands of Barbados, Ron was heading for New York and was looking forward to his meeting with the ‘aristocracy’ of the American Mafia, including Meyer Lansky, Angelo Bruno, and the Gallo Brothers.

  In the meantime, someone in the security section of the US Embassy in London, must have been hearing things about the ‘general dealer’ to whom Ray E. White Jr had granted a tourist visa. For Ronnie never got that friendly welcome he had been expecting on his first trip to America. Indeed, his
only human contact in New York was with a grim-faced member of the US immigration service who examined his passport, asked him if his name was Ronald Kray and, being told that it was, stamped his visa, with a single word in large black letters: INVALIDATED. Having done this, he dispatched Ron back to Britain on the next plane to Heathrow.

  After sitting for twenty hours high above the ocean getting nowhere, it must have been hard for Ronnie to control himself. But once back in London he saved his anger for his call to Eaton Square where Lord Boothby and his faithful butler were in the throes of imminent departure. One can but imagine how the conversation went. What did the so-and-so Americans think they were up to, giving him a visa and then cancelling it without an explanation? And what the so-and-so was Boothby going to do about it? And while he was on the subject, he and Reg had been getting too much aggravation in the last few weeks from a copper by the name of Gerrard and a younger one called Read who had both been poking their noses into their affairs. If his lordship knew what was good for him he’d better sort this out for them and be quick about it. Etc., etc.

  Whatever form the actual conversation took Ron clearly put the fear of God into Robert Boothby. Not only did his lordship promise faithfully that before he left he would raise the question of his visa with the American ambassador, he also promised that he would have a word with the Police Commissioner, Sir Joseph Simpson, about the police harassment. As usual when receiving orders from Ron Kray his lordship did as he was told.