Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  According to Hart, Bender was also given the job of disposing of Jack’s remains, which he rolled up in a bedspread and dumped in the bedroom on the bed next to the one where Carol’s children were sleeping. He also gathered up the rest of the incriminating debris in the flat, including Jack’s dangerously recognisable hat which Reg discovered on the windowsill, then started cleaning up the room with a mop and a bucket of water. But the killing had been so frenzied and chaotic that blood was spattered all around the room. Where Jack had been killed a pool of blood was already soaking into the carpet and the floor beneath.

  While Bender did his best to deal with this, Blonde Carol and Hart’s girlfriend Vicki returned from the party down the road and were ordered by Ron to take over and do their best to scrub the carpet, while Bender disposed of Jack McVitie’s body. According to Hart, the Twins had made no plans to deal with this, and Bender propped the corpse up, still wrapped in the bedspread, in the back seat of his car. He then drove it over London Bridge and parked the car outside a church near Foreman’s pub, the Prince of Wales, in Lant Street and left it there for him to deal with. But having already murdered Frank Mitchell for the Twins, Foreman’s patience with Ron and Reg was wearing thin – and he wasn’t an undertaker.

  So all that Sunday the car was left where Bender had parked it, with the body in the back barely covered with the children’s bedspread and one of the feet poking out. Later that afternoon there was a wedding in the church, but although the car was covered in confetti no one can have looked inside or noticed anything unusual. Next day it was only when someone complained to Foreman about the smell that he reluctantly became involved .

  Apart from complaining that when he removed McVitie from the car, he was covered in some sort of slime, Foreman never did say anything more about how he disposed of yet one more unwanted body. One presumes that once again he relied on the underworld’s surest way of ‘vanishing’ a corpse for good and that Jack McVitie now joined Frank Mitchell in that invaluable ‘little facility’ of his at Newhaven.

  Not that McVitie’s final destination mattered very much. What was important was the place his murder would assume in the story of the Krays that before too long would start to dominate the media, obsess the law-abiding public and enthrone the Twins in their position as murderers for ever.

  If Charlie Richardson was right and the killing of Cornell was Ron’s ‘necessary sacrifice’, then McVitie’s murder did much the same for Reg. For whatever else it might have been this was no ordinary gangland murder. There were much stranger and more compelling reasons why Jack McVitie had had to die than that.

  18

  The American

  Connection

  TOP POLICEMEN may sometimes be idle but rarely where their prospects for promotion are concerned, and among the higher ranks at Scotland Yard few can have ignored the dismal lessons of the Boothby scandal and its cover-up, followed by the disaster of McCowan.

  Even more than had been the case with the politicians and the members of the media involved, individual policemen and detectives had actually witnessed what was going on and had drawn their own conclusions. Some had done their best to deal with the Twins in the past and knew the threat they represented. Members of C11, the Yard’s own Intelligence Section, had spent some months keeping Boothby and Ron’s questionable friends under observation and had helped to write reports that had later been suppressed. Those without direct contact with the affair had been told what happened by their colleagues and had seen what had followed – with the Commissioner himself denying that an investigation into the Twins had taken place, and police activity against the Twins ceasing with the failure of the McCowan prosecution.

  With the Twins still basking in their status as ‘untouchables’ it was widely assumed among the police that Ron and Reg had access to information from the upper reaches of the Yard itself, which increased the sense that no one could be trusted. The effect of this on morale at Scotland Yard had been disastrous. A subsequent Chief Commissioner, Sir Thomas Mark, called Scotland Yard in the 1960s, ‘the most routinely corrupt organisation in London’, with the Flying Squad riddled with corruption, several senior officers regularly receiving bribes from criminals, and the head of the Yard’s Vice Squad (improbably named Inspector Virgo) sent to prison for wholesale dealing in pornography.

  Simultaneously the rumour mill at Scotland Yard was grinding out the message that the Twins would never be arrested while Sir Joseph Simpson occupied the chair of Chief Commissioner. But Sir Joseph was a tough old bird. Despite two heart attacks and serious warnings from his doctors, he was hanging in there and as long as he was Chief Commissioner he had no intention of permitting his part in the Boothby cover-up to be revealed – or any of the secrets that went with it.

  So far, so obvious, but despite the disastrous effects the cover-up had been having on law and order by making the Twins ‘untouchable’, they could hardly have gone on killing people without someone in authority making at least some effort to stop them. In 1967 two separate operations started, aimed at doing precisely that.

  The strangest and most unlikely of these operations originated from an office in the US embassy in Paris occupied by a shadowy figure called Admiral John H. Hanly. The Admiral’s job description on the contemporary diplomatic list was brief to the point of anonymity. It described him simply as ‘Chargé d’Affaires from the Treasury Department, attached to the US Embassy,’ which didn’t get one very far. The truth was that Admiral John H. Hanly was a very senior agent in the US Secret Service and a highly influential member of the American intelligence community.

  Originally created as an offshoot of the US Treasury after the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, the US Secret Service was the oldest and most prestigious law enforcement agency in America. Its first priority was, and still is, the safety and security of the President and its responsibilities extended to intelligence gathering on a range of serious federal offences, including nationwide organised crime, narcotics, counterfeiting, serious fraud and currency offences.

  With Hanly the title of admiral was deceptive. During the first world war, and later in Korea, he reached the rank of rear admiral in the Naval Reserve through distinguished active service. But in character, aptitude and training Admiral Hanly would always be a secret serviceman having started his working life before the war as an undercover agent with another branch of the Secret Service, the Bureau of Narcotics, in its struggle with the US Mafia. He had been a friend and protégé of the celebrated Chief White, the man President Roosevelt chose to head the bureau, and in 1939, when war in Europe started, Hanly enlisted with US naval intelligence.

  Through his work with the Bureau of Narcotics, Hanly had already made himself the foremost authority on the man believed to be ‘the most important Italian-American gangster the USA ever produced’, Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. During the early 1930s Luciano was responsible for ruthlessly creating the ‘national syndicate’ which formed the basis of the modern Mafia; and when the law caught up with him and gave him fifty years in prison for organising prostitution, he still maintained his undisputed hold on the Mob from inside prison.

  In 1939 the US Navy was concerned about the risk of waterfront sabotage and someone suggested that, as a patriotic American, Lucky might be asked to use his influence with the labour unions to prevent it from happening. In principle, Lucky agreed, and the result was the so-called Luciano Project on which Hanly worked for many months, visiting Luciano regularly in his cell in the Albany State Correction Centre and helping him coordinate waterfront security through Mafia members of the dockyard labour unions throughout America.

  The result was a great success and helped establish Hanly’s reputation. Maritime sabotage virtually ceased throughout the USA. But Luciano didn’t get his nickname ‘Lucky’ accidentally and there had to be a pay-off. When the war ended, Luciano was paroled for ‘services to his country’ and deported to Sicily – where he rapidly began reorganising the power of the Mafia on t
he island. Almost simultaneously Hanly joined the US Secret Service.

  The Service had offices across America and for several years Hanly was employed as an ‘agent in charge’, directing operations against organised crime in Baltimore and later in Chicago. Then in January 1961 came his proudest moment when he headed the Secret Service detail responsible for the security of President Kennedy at his inauguration. Three years later Hanly had a double stroke of luck. Late that summer he received the assignment of his life when he was granted diplomatic status at the US embassy in Paris and was put in charge of the operations of the Secret Service throughout Europe and the Middle East. This meant that he had no involvement in the blackest day in the history of the US Secret Service when three months later President Kennedy was assassinated at Dallas and the Secret Service was inevitably blamed.

  By then the Admiral had discovered much to keep him busy in Europe. In Sicily the Mafia, which Luciano helped to reestablish, was flourishing, with its laboratories working round the clock to satisfy heroin demand in Europe. In France the famous French Connection was growing richer still from the narcotics traffic with the States. And as the Mafia began shifting more of its activities to Europe, London became a target for the Mob with its octopus-like control of this most inviting new gambling capital of Europe.

  *

  The first that the Admiral heard about the Twins came at the end of 1963 when his London agents reported them ‘protecting’ Mafia-controlled casinos like the River Club and the Sporting Club in Mayfair. At first the Admiral treated this as routine information and it was not until the Boothby scandal suddenly erupted in the European press in 1964 that he first began to take them seriously. The case fascinated him, as it fascinated many foreign observers, and he was particularly intrigued by press reports describing Ronald Kray as ‘King of the London Underworld’.

  One of the responsibilities of the US Secret Service was to check on undesirables entering America and the monthly list of visas issued by their London embassy showed that ‘the King of the London Underworld’ had just received a tourist visa. When further checks revealed that he was on the point of flying to New York it was easy to ensure that one of the Admiral’s agents was there to greet him on arrival, cancel his visa, and give him the bum’s rush back to Britain.

  After this the Admiral became still more intrigued by the news that Lord Boothby had been in touch with the American ambassador in London, begging him to use his influence to overrule the cancellation of Ronald Kray’s visa. As we have seen the ambassador not only refused but he felt it his duty to report the incident, which was how news of it found its way into the file marked ‘Kray’ in the Paris Bureau of the Secret Service. When media reports of Boothby’s intervention in parliament on the Krays’ behalf, a few weeks later, were added to the file, they confirmed what the Admiral had suspected all along about the Boothby scandal. He wasn’t convinced for a moment by Lord Goodman’s cover-up and the twins appeared suspiciously like certain criminals he had known in America – godfather figures with powerful connections in politics and a dangerous ability to blackmail politicians.

  From then on Admiral Hanly started doing something that Scotland Yard refused to do, and instead of shying away from the Twins he kept them under observation. When their names came up again in connection with the marketing of the Mafia’s stolen bearer bonds in Europe, first through Leslie Payne in London and then on a larger scale through Alan Bruce Cooper’s contacts in the bank in Hamburg, he checked on that as well. Concerned that the Mafia was turning to Europe as a large-scale market for such stolen bank securities, it was the US Secret Service that stepped in and stopped the traffic, and the Twins backed off. But when the Admiral passed this information on to Scotland Yard they took no notice, and Cooper disappeared below the radar.

  With several of the Admiral’s familiar old enemies from the Mafia – like Meyer Lansky and the Gallo brothers – now controlling some of the richest gaming clubs in London and attracting gamblers by the plane-load from the States, he made a special trip to London in an attempt to persuade the authorities to crack down hard on infiltration by the Mafia. He met Sir Joseph Simpson who promised action. He met serious top officials from the Home Office who also promised action. But in the end all that happened was that the Twins’ friend George Raft, who was Meyer Lansky’s highly paid front man at the Mayfair Sporting Club, was peremptorily expelled from Britain, leaving everything exactly as it was and the Admiral feeling thoroughly frustrated .One of the few characters he met on his trip to London who shared in his frustration was the then head of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, Commander John du Rose. Both were in their mid-fifties and, like the Admiral, John du Rose had also started his career as something of a star, with the press hailing him as ‘Four-day Johnny’ because of the time he took to solve a murder. But now, as head of the Murder Squad, he was feeling thwarted by the Commissioner’s refusal to allow either him or his detectives to pursue the Krays for involvement in Cornell’s murder. The fact that Four-Day Johnny personally failed to get on with Simpson didn’t help the situation, and like the Admiral he believed that there was no excuse for such behaviour. ‘But that’s what happens when policemen get involved in politics,’ as he told the Admiral.

  The Admiral sympathised and promised he would find a way to deal with the Twins and their friends in the Mafia. In the meantime, to show that he meant business, he instructed one of his agents in Morocco to inform his friend, the police chief in Tangier, that Ronnie Kray was in his city. A few days later Ron received his marching orders from the Governor of Tangier and found himself for ever banished from his favourite hunting ground for teenage boys.

  It was early in 1967 that the Admiral’s patience was rewarded and he got the lucky break he needed. A report came through from Washington DC that a drug trafficker called David Nathan had been arrested with a shipment of LSD that had come from Marseilles. It had been sent by his son-in-law who was resident in France, and the Admiral recognised the name at once. It was Alan Bruce Cooper.

  Had the Admiral been a policeman he would have played safe, ordered Cooper’s extradition to stand trial with Nathan in the States, and congratulated himself on having struck a further blow against the growing traffic in narcotics between Europe and America. But the Admiral wasn’t a policeman. He was a secret serviceman, and secret servicemen have different mindsets from policemen. All the Admiral’s instincts told him that once he relinquished Alan Bruce Cooper he would lose the hottest contact he would ever have between the Kray Twins and the Mafia. It was most unlikely he would ever get a chance like this again and he felt that it was up to him to grab it while he could.

  One can see the Admiral’s point of view, but one can also see that he was now in danger of believing that the Twins’ involvement with the Mafia was far greater than it really was. This led him to believe that once he had Cooper under his control he would hold the magic key to a whole range of Mafia-backed operations, not just in Britain but throughout the rest of Europe. Mistakes like this occur in the fluctuating world of criminal intelligence, but in spite of this, like the old spymaster that he was, the Admiral was unable to resist having Cooper brought to Paris and offering him a deal. Either face extradition to America, with a twenty-year stretch in prison at the end of it, or work for Uncle Sam. To nobody’s surprise, Alan Bruce Cooper chose Uncle Sam.

  Cooper always insisted that narcotics really weren’t his thing and that the LSD parcel he dispatched from France was sent purely as a favour to a member of the family. This might have been true, for Cooper really was a much bigger fish than he appeared. Physically he was not impressive. He was very small, with a worrying stutter, thin parchment-coloured hair and a faint moustache like a child’s eyebrow painted on his upper lip. But his lack of inches might have been the reason for his remarkable survival. A bigger, more dominating character would have probably attracted enemies in the macho world of big-time crime. But people tended not to notice Cooper, and across the years he’d grown rich f
rom several major deals involving gold smuggling, arms dealing and, more recently, from milking the ever-growing international trade in stolen securities. For him all this was just as well, for if Cooper had a weakness it was a liking for the good life, which had left him with expensive tastes – as the Admiral soon discovered when he tried deciding how to use him.

  The Admiral’s plan turned out to be the sort of undercover operation you find in the pages of 1960s secret-service thrillers by Len Deighton and John le Carré, and landed Cooper with the role of a double agent working closely with the Krays and reporting back to the Admiral in Paris. This meant there was a lot at stake and the Admiral, who had learned his trade by dealing with no less a character than Lucky Luciano, was treating this as yet another major operation. In return for all the trouble he was taking he was counting on the Krays becoming an invaluable source of information over the whole range of the Mob’s activities in Britain, including gambling, counterfeit currency and the large-scale marketing of stolen securities in Europe. So this was not the time to cut back on expenses. Since the US Secret Service was a branch of the US Treasury, it could call on almost limitless resources, which the Admiral decided he would use to set Cooper up in London in the style to which he was accustomed and that the Twins expected of him. He would have to take his time to gain their confidence and slowly gather all their secrets. The Admiral knew that this would not be easy.

  Before Cooper moved to London, the Admiral realised that he would need support in London from someone in authority. So he invited John du Rose to Paris, explained what he proposed for Cooper, and suggested making it a joint operation against the Twins and the Mafia in London.