Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  Violet, ready as ever to indulge her boys, had even placed her spare bedroom at the snakes’ disposal and it was there that I saw them several evenings later. Something about the snakes appealed to Ron who loved fondling them and playing games with them. What he particularly enjoyed was to place a live mouse at the far end of the room, at which point the Twins would bet on which snake got it first. One of the few times I saw Ron become genuinely excited was as he watched the mouse crouch petrified against the wainscot, then scuttle off beneath the table. Quick as lightning, both the snakes would dart off in pursuit. But somehow it was always Read who got the mouse.

  Apart from taking pictures for the book of the Twins entwined with Read and Gerrard it was around this time that Bailey introduced them to his friend and agent David Puttnam. As well as having made themselves immortal as identical twin murderers, the Twins had now got themselves a film producer, a biographer, a famous photographer at their beck and call and an agent who would end up in the House of Lords.

  Meanwhile Nipper Read, although still tucked away in conventlike secrecy in Tintagel House, had finally got lucky.

  It was more than a year since the Twins had severed all connections with their one-time friend and patron Leslie Payne. But until Ron stupidly hired Jack the Hat to kill him, Payne had kept away from them and the last thing he would have done was to betray them. But when Ron began threatening not only him but also his family, the former infantry sergeant from Monte Cassino decided that he had had enough. When Inspector Hemingway approached him on behalf of Nipper Read and asked if he would help with his inquiries, he agreed to do so

  During the first weeks of January, Nipper, methodical as ever, interviewed Leslie Payne every morning for several weeks in a room in a small hotel in Marylebone. Not only did Payne possess a remarkable memory but he had more detailed knowledge than anyone of what the Twins and members of The Firm had been up to during the last twelve years. From Payne’s information Nipper compiled what he called his ‘delightful index’, a detailed list of more than thirty key accomplices of the Krays and their victims.

  He and his team contacted every one of them and had little difficulty persuading them to talk. But Nipper knew that it would be a different matter persuading them to give evidence in court. As one potential witness said to him, ‘I hate the sight of blood, particularly my own.’

  To set their minds at rest he gave each one of them a written undertaking not to use their statements in evidence against the Twins until they were safely behind bars.

  This meant that Nipper found himself in something of a Catch-22 situation. He was getting all the evidence he needed to put the Kray twins under lock and key but he couldn’t use any of it until he’d got them there. Something had to happen that would break the deadlock.

  Whenever the Twins were otherwise engaged they ordered their father, old Charlie, to show me round what remained of the traditional East End. I never met anyone who had a good word to say about this disreputable old cockney boozer but I found him fascinating company and finally got to like him, although it was obviously unwise to say so to the Twins. He was a great source of information, not only about the old villains he had known and drunk with but also about growing up in Hoxton after the first world war and how he had made a living as a rag-and-bone man. The poor man clearly had much to complain about at home, with everybody in the house against him, and it was hardly his fault that his maverick sperm had once decided to divide in Violet’s womb and then turn into Ron and Reg

  Thanks to the Twins I even got to meet Dot Brown, the wife of Tommy Brown, my one-time chauffeur. Dot’s mad predictions had been having a dangerous influence on Ron. A big blonde woman who looked like a cockney Buddha, she was sharing a tiny flat over a betting shop in Walthamstow with her enormous husband and her crystal ball. The set-up was so absurdly cosy that it was strange to think of Ron coming here for consolation and advice. ‘The thing about Ronnie is that he has a very strong spirit guide protecting him, and I tell him that no one can ever harm him or trick him. In any crisis his spirit guide will tell him what to do, and provided he listens no harm will befall him,’ she told me.

  Another member of the Kray entourage I met was Bobby Buckley, one-time jockey, former star croupier at Esmeralda’s Barn and the only one of Ron’s regiment of teenage lovers whom he might possibly have loved. ‘If it’d been legal, I’d ’ave married ’im,’ he told me. But as it wasn’t legal, Ron married him off instead to his girlfriend Monica. Like Bobby, Monica was tiny and it might have been her doll-like appearance that appealed to Ron for he seems to have ended up in love with both of them. He told me that, apart from Violet, Monica was the only woman he had ever trusted. She seems to have brought out an unsuspected sentimental streak in him and he promised that he would always be her sugar daddy. ‘Now tuck yourself up warm and make sure to look after yourself,’ he used to tell her.

  I also got to know most members of the so-called Firm, who struck me as a fairly seedy lot, whose major role in life appeared to be to drink, collect the weekly ‘pensions’ from the local clubs and businesses and provide an appreciative audience for the Twins themselves.

  It’s interesting that the one member of The Firm who seemed a cut above the rest and whom the Twins obviously trusted was the one who would soon prove himself the greatest Judas of them all: their cousin, former pimp and merchant seaman, young good-looking Ronnie Hart whom I’d met that first night at the Astor. At the time, for Ron at any rate, Hart enjoyed the role of the Twins’ honorary son and heir and, in accordance with the understanding I had reached with them, rather than tell me anything directly incriminating themselves, they relied on their cousin to do it for them, on the theory that anything he told me would be classed as ‘hearsay’.

  But since it was obviously important to the Twins that I should know something of the truth about them, cousin Hart was deputed to take me to the Blind Beggar and tell me what had happened. He did this very coolly, and as I got to know him better he hinted at other killings, including that of somebody he simply called ‘The Hat’.

  In a very different picture from the one he later gave in court, Ron Hart described living with the Twins as one great adventure, and for him everything about them was essentially heroic. ‘The Twins are like Roman gladiators,’ he said, ‘and, like gladiators, they only kill their own.’

  Ron Hart told me something else that stuck firmly in my mind. Recently Reg had told him that if anything happened to him and Ron he was to make sure they had the biggest funeral that the East End had ever seen.

  Cousin Ron apart, the most fascinating character the Twins introduced me to was the former burglar turned criminal tycoon Billy Hill who was living in considerable style in his burglar-proof flat in Bayswater, opposite the Greek cathedral. What I found so interesting about him was the fact that he was exactly the sort of rich, successful criminal that the Twins might well have been themselves if there hadn’t been so many ‘ifs’ in their criminal career – if Ron and Reg had not been twins, if Ron had not been mad, and if they hadn’t felt obliged to murder anyone.

  Now approaching fifty, which in the 1960s seemed like terminal senility, Billy Hill had risen from a background of such poverty that it made the Twins’ childhood in Bethnal Green sound like the lap of luxury. The eldest of twenty-three children of Irish parents – the father devoted to the bottle, the mother to the Virgin Mary – he told me how he started on his life of crime at the age of eight, stealing books from the stalls in Farringdon Market which he sold to other stallholders for a penny each.

  But, unlike the Twins, he had completely cut himself off from his past.

  ‘Not long ago I went back to King’s Cross and saw some of the old friends I’d grown up with. All of them had been living decent, honest lives, and by the age that I am now almost all of them were burned out, done for, finished, whereas here am I enjoying the wages of sin. I have a new wife, a lovely house in southern Spain, and if people want to say that I’m responsible for the Hatt
on Garden heist or the London airport gold job, that’s up to them.’

  Billy Hill apart, my most significant encounter in the presence of the Twins around this time occurred one evening early in the New Year when the most unlikely couple I had seen in Whitechapel drove up in a brown and black Rolls-Royce and entered the saloon bar of the Old Horns, looking as if they owned it. The girl was ridiculously elegant in a pale designer coat and, although her companion was several inches shorter, he too was immaculately dressed in the sort of camel-hair overcoat that bandleaders were still wearing in the 1960s. From their accents I took them for Americans in search of local colour who had wandered into the Old Horns by mistake. But to my surprise, instead of being promptly redirected to the door they seemed to know the Twins and I found myself being introduced to Alan Bruce Cooper, his wife Beverley and Sam, their Yorkshire terrier.

  Each of the Twins reacted to the presence of the Coopers very differently. Before long, Reg turned his back on them, leaving me to talk to Beverley while her husband retreated to a corner for what was clearly an important talk with Ron. Later, when I asked Reg about them both, he changed the subject.

  A week or so later the unlikely pair made a second visit to the Horns. This time they were accompanied by a weird young man who was as tall and silent as a stick of human celery. When I tried engaging him in conversation he looked desperately around him and seemed scared out of his wits.

  Again I asked Reg about him afterwards, and he told me that the man’s name was Elvey.

  ‘What does he do for a living?’ I inquired.

  ‘He says he kills people,’ Reg replied.

  ‘And does he?’ I asked.

  Reg looked at me and shrugged.

  21

  Showdown in New York

  ON THOSE TWO uncomfortable occasions when I met Alan Bruce Cooper and his attractive wife Beverley at the Old Horns in the presence of the Twins he struck me as a man with too much on his mind. But I had no notion of the problems he was facing, particularly on his second visit when he turned up with that pallid mystery man – and apparently potential murderer – Paul Elvey. Behind the scenes far more was going on than I suspected but it was not until much later that I understood the full importance of that most unlikely pair in the melodrama rapidly unfolding round the Twins, in what would prove to be their last remaining weeks of freedom.

  It was a strange period, for during these climactic days I was not the only one completely in the dark over what was going on. Superintendent Leonard Read, for instance, knew even less than I did about what his boss Commander John du Rose was up to. Nipper had yet to meet Cooper in the flesh and had not the faintest notion of the relationship between him, Paul Elvey and that devious old detective.

  Away from this uneasy situation, back in the relative sanity of Tintagel House, things were happening. Witness statements from a surprising range of victims of the Twins were mounting up. Leslie Payne in his morning sessions with Nipper in the Marylebone hotel was giving him a detailed run-down of everything he could remember from the past about the Twins and Nipper and his boys had now discovered that they had another murder on their hands – the so-far-corpseless death of Jack McVitie. But beyond all this they knew little more of what had really happened, and as things stood Nipper still had insufficient evidence to arrest the Twins and be sure of a conviction. Still less could he have secured the arrest of other members of the Firm who would undoubtedly have interfered with many of his witnesses. So the stalemate continued. Nipper and his men could only wait for something big enough to change the landscape of the whole investigation.

  The one senior Scotland Yard detective who was perfectly aware of Nipper Read’s frustration was, of course, his immediate superior, Commander John du Rose. But now was not the moment for du Rose to confront Nipper with the truth of what he had been up to. For more than ever now, what du Rose wanted was to be the old ‘Four-Day Johnny’ of the past, solving these unsolved murders with a sudden stroke of his former genius. Unlike Nipper, du Rose still believed that he held the secret that would break the stalemate, solve the case and leave the Twins wide open to arrest.

  There was one further key development. On 8 March HM’s Commissioner for Metropolitan Police Sir Joseph Simpson had his final heart attack. This meant that the Twins had lost their prime protector at the Yard. Simpson’s successor, Sir John Waldron, was a very different character.

  As for the Twins themselves, had they really wanted to avoid arrest and had they been prepared to stay contentedly in Bethnal Green, keeping a low profile and concentrating on their story and their film, they would have been immensely difficult to deal with. More importantly, had Reg not Ron been in command and made the key decisions they might still have rivalled Billy Hill in criminal longevity. But the murder of McVitie had left Ron more dangerously insane and powerful than ever.

  *

  During the last three years during which Lord Goodman’s intervention in the Boothby scandal had rendered them ‘untouchable’ the Twins had not only got away with murder but with serial murder. As we have seen, their victims had included George Cornell, Frank Mitchell, Teddy Smith and now Jack McVitie. So it was not entirely surprising that, as long as Ron was on a high, he still believed he was invulnerable, particularly with psychic Dot around to reassure him that no harm could possibly befall him. The time was fast approaching when he couldn’t wait to kill again.

  Either way, believing he could count on Reg as his accomplice if it came to murder, Ron was becoming more dangerous by the day. But he also felt he needed Cooper if he was to deal with all the enemies around him. He had methodically started listing them. At the top of the list was Leslie Payne and he knew that Payne would shortly be appearing at the Old Bailey charged with fraud. This could provide an opportunity to kill him, and he automatically turned to Cooper for a foolproof way of doing so.

  This was when Elvey made his first appearance on the scene. For amazingly, that frightened-looking white-faced character, that Cooper had brought along with him at our second meeting, was set to play a lethal role in the dangerous drama being acted out around him. I’ve no idea where Cooper found him. All that he ever told me was that Elvey was an unemployed electrician. He was also something of a fantasist and claimed to have seen active service with the SAS.

  I never believed the talk about the SAS but Elvey was certainly a skilled technician, and during the short period when he worked as Cooper’s assistant he showed himself prepared to use several deadly weapons for the Twins on Cooper’s orders. Today, the first of these weapons has pride of place in the famous Black Museum at Scotland Yard, and on that one occasion when I met him at the pub with Cooper he and Cooper had arrived to give the Twins a demonstration of this sinister invention. From the start, Reg seemed bored with what was going on but Ron was obviously excited and couldn’t wait to see what they had brought him. Whatever it was, Elvey had left it outside in the car and I discovered later that when they left the pub Cooper, Ron and Elvey drove straight back to Braithwaite House where they tried it out against one of Violet’s sofas.

  Elvey’s secret weapon was a small suitcase containing a hypodermic filled with cyanide. Attached to the handle of the case was a small brass ring which, when pulled, made the needle of the hypodermic protrude through a small hole at the bottom of the case. When activated and then pushed against a human body in a crowd, the poison from the hypodermic would be instantly released into the victim’s bloodstream and death would follow almost instantaneously. This was Elvey’s murder weapon number one and he told the Twins that he was perfectly prepared to try it out on Leslie Payne if they wanted him to.

  Despite the secrecy surrounding Nipper’s meetings with Payne, word had got around of what was going on and Ron was now convinced that Payne was betraying them. He also knew that during the next few days Payne was going to appear in a fraud case at the Old Bailey. This would be Elvey’s chance to prove himself and his secret weapon. For as Payne made his way through the crowded lobby of the
Central Courts of Justice, Elvey – whom he didn’t know – could get behind him with his suitcase, pull the ring, and thrust the hidden hypodermic into him. Apparently all of this had been arranged down to the last detail, and Cooper in his role as agent provocateur had also told du Rose of what would happen. Du Rose, in turn, had made arrangements for two plain-clothes officers to be waiting in the lobby at the Old Bailey, ready to arrest Elvey just before he struck.

  But on the day when the murder should have taken place, Nipper had got the case against Leslie Payne postponed. This meant that, at the last minute, everything was called off but nobody told Elvey, who was left waiting with his suitcase in the crowded lobby of the Old Bailey for the would-be victim who never came.

  For Ron this was a major disappointment. But as something of a consolation prize Cooper had already thought up one more way of killing Payne. On Cooper’s instructions Elvey had found another secret weapon – a powerful crossbow which was normally used for hunting deer and planting anaesthetic darts in wild elephants in Africa. Elvey had calculated that the steel-tipped darts could kill a man at up to fifty yards and had presented a crossbow to the twins who tried it out on a cat in Epping Forest. This excited Ron, but Reg pointed out that it would impossible to use a crossbow in a public place and insisted on returning it to Elvey.

  This made Ron more desperate than ever to lay hands on the two Thompson sub-machine guns that he’d been pestering Cooper about for months. In the film Bonnie and Clyde had used Thompson sub-machine guns in their final shoot-out with the FBI, and in his nightmares Ron could see himself with Reg beside him acting out the same scenario. It was on hearing this that Cooper nearly lost his nerve.

  The role of an agent provocateur must be one of the most enviable jobs that any undercover agent can be given, and by encouraging Cooper to persuade a homicidal maniac like Ron to incriminate himself by murdering someone, the Admiral had placed him in a ghastly situation. For with Ron’s bouts of homicidal madness steadily increasing, he was showing signs of getting out of all control. If anything, Cooper had actually been a little too successful. Elvey’s weapons had excited Ron and he couldn’t wait to use them.