Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  For political reasons a distinguished but over-influential lawyer had been able to suppress the truth about the intrusion of organised crime into British politics; and in so doing not only did he kill the truth but he also helped to gag the British press from any meaningful discussion of the scandal for years to come. For out of craven fear of Arnold Goodman – and because of the iniquities of the English law of libel – the press had effectively gagged itself over anything to do with either Boothby or the Krays.

  This happened largely through the operation of the Establishment’s traditional secondary line of defence, the so-called ‘old boy network’. This was an area in which Boothby himself had always been a wily operator and he still had powerful allies whom he could trust.

  Foremost, of course, was his old friend, and fellow holiday-maker, Sir Colin Coote who edited the Daily Telegraph. His frequent host Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of Express Newspapers, had always been another close admirer and, as Boothby had recently been telling Ronnie Kray, the editor of The Times, Sir William Haley, was yet another influential ally. Since Goodman had already tightly gagged the Mirror papers and the Sun through the terms of his agreement with Cecil King, this left few papers willing or able to risk breaking ranks on the subject. What was soon to prove of such importance to the Krays was not that the Establishment, and virtually the entire media with it, had now closed ranks so tightly round Boothby and Tom Driberg. Frankly, the Krays themselves didn’t care remotely for either of these deeply dodgy politicians. What did concern them was ensuring that, with the Establishment and the media now in denial over the whole Boothby scandal, the cover-up covered them as well. They were very much aware of this when, with barely four weeks left before their trial began, they started making active preparations for a masterclass in the not so gentle art of fixing a trial at the Old Bailey.

  Until now the Twins had been acting on their own, but although they were still on remand in Brixton Jail, there remained one person they could turn to for advice – their legal adviser Manny Fryde (pronounced Freedy). He was a character who would have fascinated Dickens. Officially he was no more than the Twins’ legal adviser because he was not a qualified solicitor, but whether this was because he’d been struck off as a lawyer in his native South Africa or because he’d never qualified was one of many mysteries that surrounded him. Another mystery was how, although he was no more than the managing clerk of the law firm of Sampson and Co. which employed him, old Manny ran every aspect of the business from his office in the company’s decrepit premises in the shadow of the Old Bailey, which he haunted like a hungry undertaker.

  As a total outsider to the cliquey world of lawyers, whatever human sympathies Manny might have had were saved for the criminals he represented. He spoke like them, felt like them, and looked wickeder than any of them. Since he was probably more cunning and unscrupulous than any other lawyer in the business, he and the Twins were made for one another.

  When they said that all they wanted was to avoid going back to prison, he told them that that was simple. As with most things in life there was a simple answer – money, and a lot of it.

  If the Twins were happy to rely on legal aid and take whatever barristers the system offered to defend them, they might as well forget the next few years and go to prison straight away. But provided they had money and knew how to use it, they could have the finest legal brains in Britain to defend them.

  Reg saw the point at once. He always blamed his spell in prison on Paul Wrightson, the formidable prosecuting counsel, and said that this time round he wanted Wrightson on his side. Ron agreed, and asked Manny who would be the best barrister to defend him. He suggested the influential barrister politician Sir Peter Crowder MP, QC, with young Ivan Lawrence as his junior.

  Apart from advising them to get the top barristers in London to represent them Manny made another shrewd suggestion. It was always claimed that he remembered something suspicious in McCowan’s past which might make him vulnerable in cross-examination, and because of this he advised hiring George Devlin who was known as the smartest private eye in London. He would cost as much as a top barrister but Manny guessed correctly that in a case like this he could be worth every penny.

  Finally, of course, there were the members of the Firm. There was now a lot of work for them to do and they too would need paying.

  This was a problem. Thanks to the Twins’ expenses and loss of earning power during their current troubles that sort of money was the one thing that they lacked. Living very much from day to day and relying on people they could tap for contributions, their finances were, as usual, quite chaotic.

  When I asked Ron how much he and Reg spent on their defence he said around £10,000. But this was probably an underestimate: Manny’s services did not come cheap, and as the Twins always lived beyond their means, I have estimated that they spent between twenty and thirty thousand pounds on their defence, most of it up front. By now they were running short of money. They could raise something from friends and victims but nothing like enough. There remained one obvious source who they knew could not refuse them – Boothby; and there was one thing they wanted from him – the rest of the ‘tainted money’ from the Sunday Mirror. A few days later brother Charlie made another trip to Eaton Square to put the final squeeze on Boothby.

  Charlie was kept busy as he had to see two equally important characters who had been at the Hideaway Club when Mad Teddy had made his fateful visit – Sydney Vaughan and Peter Byrne. At the remand hearings they had appeared for the prosecution but how could either of them now argue when Charlie paid them both a visit accompanied by the Twins’ old friend, the eighteen-stone ex-wrestler Tommy ‘The Bear’ Brown and made it plain where their best interests lay. Charlie had no problem getting Byrne to change his story. Vaughan took longer, but finally he too agreed that he had appeared for the prosecution only under extreme duress. Later Charlie took them both back to his flat where they met Father Foster, the young priest from the local church of St James the Less, who duly witnessed their sworn statements to that effect.

  On 7 March, when the trial opened, everything had been so carefully set up by Manny Fryde and the Twins that, thanks to Devlin and the work of several members of the Firm, the prosecution really didn’t stand a chance. The first shock came when the prosecution learned that their two key witnesses, Vaughan and Byrne, had inexplicably gone over to the defence. But there was worse to come. It had not been hard for Manny Fryde to discover the names and the addresses of the jurors and pick one or two of them who, for a slight consideration, might be prepared to do the Twins a favour. As Manny knew quite well, a vulnerable point in the legal system was the rule that a jury’s verdict had to be unanimous. And as the trial proceeded, trouble started with the jurors. One was suddenly hit with a mysterious illness and, to avoid arousing the interest of the press photographers, had to be driven from the court lying on the floor of his taxi. Manny had been hoping this would lead to a retrial but instead the judge ordered the trial to continue with eleven jurors. But even then, all was far from lost. By a strange coincidence, when the jury retired to consider their verdict one of them was unable to agree with the others – and went on disagreeing for the next four hours, until the judge had no alternative but to discharge the jury, and order a retrial eight days later. Those eight days allowed Devlin to follow the advice of Manny Fryde and spend some time in Edinburgh, working through recent Scottish court records. He returned with his notebook full of information on the private life of Hew McCowan.

  With the two witnesses Byrne and Vaughan now on the side of the defence, the prosecution at this point depended more than ever on McCowan. But as soon as Reg’s counsel Paul Wrightson rose to cross-examine him it was clear that what remained of Boothby’s ‘tainted money’ had not been spent in vain.

  Wrightson was at his most effective. Was it true, he asked Mr McCowan, that on such-and-such dates you appeared as a prosecution witness in no less than three homosexual-blackmail cases, two of them in Scot
land.

  Then, with gentle sarcasm, he continued: ‘Mr McCowan, I am wondering how it is that you have been in this unfortunate position three times already. Did you think that you would be getting public acclaim for giving this evidence today, or did you have some other reason?’

  By the time that Wrightson had finished with him, McCowan’s credibility had gone and for all intents and purposes the trial was over apart from one remaining possibility – a guilty verdict from the jury. But, of course, it would have to be unanimous. Was there any chance of this, Judge Arvold asked the foreman of the jury.

  ‘None at all, my lord,’ replied the foreman of the jury, leaving Judge Arvold no alternative but to dismiss the case, for the second time. After this there could be no question of another retrial. Mad Teddy and the Twins walked out of the Old Bailey to freedom.

  The Twins’ victory was, in fact, even greater than it seemed. Not only had they avoided imprisonment, but they had finally scared off Scotland Yard, who now retreated ignominiously.

  It had been entirely against the wishes and advice of the Police Commissioner to tangle with the Kray Twins in the first place, and the whole operation had subsequently been absurdly feeble and half-hearted. To have allowed the Krays to win by scaring prosecution witnesses and suborning jurors, and then to rely on a chief prosecution witness as vulnerable as Hew McCowan – what sort of top Scotland Yard investigation was that?

  Gerrard said nothing, but later Nipper Read would admit that it had been the worst defeat of his career.

  But then, what did anyone expect following the Boothby cover-up? When top criminals are protected by distinguished lawyers on behalf of the Establishment, and famous members of the House of Lords decided to intervene on their behalf in parliament, it would have taken a courageous Commissioner of Police to have still gone all out to convict them.

  But, as we know, Sir Joseph Simpson was not courageous in the face of the political establishment, any more than were those members of the Establishment itself who had colluded in the cover-up in the first place.

  So what one witnessed now in the wake of the McCowan disaster was an ignominious retreat. If Goodman’s perjured victory over Mirror Newspapers halted any meaningful attack on the Krays by the media, the craven defeat of the prosecution in the McCowan case did much the same at Scotland Yard. For Scotland Yard, of course, had shared in the defeat and now they shared in the results of Arnold Goodman’s cover-up. By any standards of policing or of law enforcement the whole affair was shameful.

  Gerrard, who would soon retire, was moved to other duties, and Nipper Read, who was the one detective with the awareness and the knowledge of the Twins to have still been capable of tackling them, was instantly transferred as far away from London and the Twins as possible. Having stated that no blame attached to him for what had happened, he was exiled to a murder case in Ireland and spent the next three years free from all concern about the Twins as far as ordinary policing was concerned.

  As for Sir Joseph Simpson, he seemed to have gone into what is known as ‘denial’ over anything relating to the Krays. Like the three wise monkeys he could see no evil, think no evil, and certainly do no evil to the Twins for the remainder of his life. What made this so extraordinary was that after the McCowan case, although there was no outcry in the muted media, there was one thing that they had done by exploiting the jury system that was so serious that it couldn’t be ignored.

  Since members of the press were so anxious to say nothing that could be construed as criticising either of them, the Kray Twins never got the credit they deserved for having brought about a fundamental change in one of the most important laws of England, a law that had been in existence for at least six hundred years. Rarely had one of the protective pillars of the English legal system been changed for ever with so little discussion or publicity. Thanks to the McCowan case English jury law was abruptly changed – and, thanks largely to the Twins, it was announced that a jury’s verdict no longer had to be unanimous but could be settled by a majority. And so, whatever else they’d done, the Twins had made their mark on the country’s legal history.

  14

  Sing, Fuck You, Sing!

  WHEN IT FINALLY arrived, the Twins’ acquittal from the McCowan case was not entirely unexpected and they made the most of it. Someone had tipped off the press, and as the Twins came down the steps of the Old Bailey the family was out in force to greet them, including Violet and Auntie May and their old grandfather, Cannonball Lee, who was soon boring the reporters with tales of how he had taught the Twins to box. But the star of the occasion was Reg’s new fiancée, Frances Shea. While he’d been in prison Reg had proposed and Frances had finally accepted. Now she was there to greet him.

  The April sun was shining and for this one brief moment in their lives the pair of them looked truly happy. Unlike Ron, Reg had kept his looks and there was something childlike about Frances with her shy girl’s smile and auburn hair. She was not quite the girl next door but she lived with her parents in Ormsby Street, which from Vallance Road is just around the corner. Reg had known her since she was a child and had written to her every day while he’d been on remand. Whatever else it was, his love for her was deeply sentimental. She was his little goddess, his treasured Frankie, and he had courted her and written poems for her and showered her with gifts. Now, having proved his innocence in court, he was free to marry her.

  Given the circumstances, the engagement was a natural for the press and the reporters and the press photographers made the most of it. At that moment even the most cynical of them might just have thought that the fates could still be cheated and that the twisted story of the Twins would have its happy ending. But by now there was little chance of that for, as always with the Krays, the subplot was somewhat different from the story in the press.

  The Sheas were Irish. The Krays had known them for years and Frances Shea’s father, Frank Shea Sr, had worked at the Regency Club as a croupier. The family were all good-looking and at one stage Ron had fancied Frances’s brother Frank Shea Jr and had tried – unsuccessfully – to rape him. Coincidentally, it was around this time that Reg first noticed how pretty Frank Shea’s little sister Frances had become.

  Although by then Ron was openly acknowledging that he was gay, Reg never really did – despite the fact that, as his brother’s twin, they shared an identical genetic make-up and their inherited sexual orientation was of course identical. In their teens they had gone for much the same young boys and had had similar affairs. But then had come the period when, with Ron first in prison and then in the mental hospital, Reg had started to enjoy the company of women. He might or he might not have slept with them but as far as Frances was concerned it didn’t matter. Frances was very much her own person and had no intention of losing her virginity before there was a wedding ring on her finger.

  Even as early as August 1960, when Reg was briefly back in prison, he and Frances seem to have taken it for granted that one day they would marry. But as she made very clear to Reg in one of her letters, she was an old-fashioned girl and had no intention of being hurried.

  ‘I’ve made up my mind when I want to get married – not next year but the July afterwards. That will give us enough time to get a house built and get the wedding organised properly. We don’t want to rush anything, because it’s got to last a lifetime.’

  This was typical of Frances and from prison Reg had gone along with her – although he used to fantasise about her and what they’d do together after his release. In the letters I have seen, the only hint he gives of anything unusual in his attitude to sex is a casual reference to bondage. ‘I have been thinking of a new way of tying you – Ha Ha! – and then tormenting you. Is there anything you are particularly looking forward to?’ he asks.

  That year, after Reg’s release, the two of them had gone to Spain. But Frances hated the sight of blood and didn’t care for bullfights, which had always fascinated him. Another year Reg took her to Milan where they spent an evening at La
Scala holding hands throughout the most romantic of Puccini’s operas, Madame Butterfly. One odd feature of these holidays together was that, as Frances made a point of telling her father afterwards, Reg always insisted that they slept in separate rooms. ‘I respected Reg for that, and saw him as a good clean-living fellow who looked after my daughter,’ Frank Shea Sr remarked. More worldly-wise, his wife Elsie, who had been told by Frank Shea Jr of Ron’s behaviour, had formed her own suspicions about Reg from the start.

  For the moment, however, in the excitement of the Twins’ acquittal, all this seemed unimportant and the Krays had much to celebrate. Back in Bethnal Green they were being hailed as local heroes for their victory over the police. The Twins had bought the Hideaway Club from Hew McCowan at a knockdown price. And Boothby had written to congratulate them as only he could. ‘In a way I feel that we have both been vindicated,’ he wrote, although it’s hard to see how this could have applied to him. This was, in fact, the last that the Twins would ever hear from him, for his life too was changing. He might even have learned his lesson, for soon he would be marrying Wanda Sanna, the convent-educated daughter of a Sardinian import-export dealer. According to Boothby’s biographer, his bride, who was thirty-three years his junior, ‘realised that there could be no question of children’ and they are said to have stayed happily together until his death in 1986. (Rhodes James, p. 408.)