Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  Because of this, Cooper felt he had to stay in close contact with the Twins to be able to inform du Rose in advance about the next projected killing. But as Ron had by now told him how McVitie died, Cooper was under no illusions about the dangers he was facing. It was this that brought him close to panicking. Had he been on his own, self-preservation would have told him that the time had come to disappear and face the consequences. But he had a wife and child to think of, so he turned to John Du Rose instead.

  Du Rose saw him, as he often did, in his office at the Yard, and calm as ever, puffed away at his cheroot, making sympathetic noises but there was not a great deal he could do to help him. Cooper was Admiral Hanly’s man, not his. Over the last few months, the Admiral and the US Secret Service had invested large amounts of time and money running Cooper as an agent and John du Rose had no intention of poaching on the Admiral’s territory. The Admiral was still very much in charge, and the truth was that John du Rose was wary of upsetting an organisation as powerful as the US Secret Service. It was only when Cooper told him he could not go on like this that Du Rose suggested that he went to Paris and discussed the situation with the Admiral.

  Like du Rose, on seeing Cooper Admiral Hanly was extremely sympathetic, and finally produced a plan which he believed would solve the problem. The Admiral seemed to have a plan for everything and told Cooper that he didn’t want to have his death on his conscience. Because of this he was determined to settle the whole case quickly now, before someone else was hurt: provided they were smart it should be possible to serve the interests of both the US Secret Service and Scotland Yard, and incriminate the Twins and their friends from the Mafia in a single operation. Just to prove to Cooper that the US Secret Service was behind him all the way, the Admiral told him that he himself would be directing operations from Paris.

  *

  As he had shown in the war, the Admiral was a man of action, and was eager for results. Obsessed as ever with establishing links between organised criminals in Europe and the USA he was hoping to set up a series of meetings between the Twins and old friends of theirs who were still important members of the Mafia. Their meetings and their phone calls could be monitored, their conversations recorded, and if he could only get them all together the results could be sensational, yielding information over a whole range of international criminal activities including narcotics, money laundering, lucrative gambling operations and even contract killings. The more the Admiral thought about it, the more exciting it appeared. With just a little luck, the Twins and their friends in the Mafia would incriminate themselves and arrests could follow on both sides of the Atlantic.

  In fact the whole plan was wildly ambitious. If anyone should have known how deeply suspicious top members of the Mafia could be, it was Admiral Hanly. But the truth was that, having now invested so much Secret Service money in Cooper and the Twins, he wanted something positive to show for it to the folks back home in Washington. What was needed was a spot of action to reassure them that Admiral Hanly was still firmly on the ball.

  Whatever Cooper may have thought of this, as usual he could only go along with what the Admiral was suggesting. And so what must surely count as one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of the US Secret Service started.

  From the start Admiral Hanly’s plan to bring together the Kray Twins with a group of top brass from the Mob faced one big problem. All those highly suspect characters that the Admiral was so interested in were in America, and since Ron, at any rate, was permanently banned from visiting the States such a meeting would take a lot of organising. A lesser man might well have quailed, but the word ‘impossible’ was not in Admiral Hanly’s mental dictionary and he had always treated problems such as this as challenges. A visit to the USA by a pair of criminals as notorious as the Twins would certainly require official backing at the highest level, just as the logistics of arranging such a visit as he had in mind would be quite formidable and would need clearance by the FBI, the US Immigration Service and the directorate of the US Secret Service. All of which the Admiral must have had, since his plans for the Twins’ visit to New York now went ahead.

  As Ron’s last trip to America three years earlier had ended with him being officially banned from entering the States, this must have needed quite a lot of doing. Certainly Admiral Hanly was one of the very few Americans who could have arranged for a criminal as notorious as Ron to be issued with a valid visa to enter the USA. As well as this there would need to be arrangements for airline tickets, and bookings in suitable hotels, in Paris and New York. Nothing could be left to chance and it was not until the last week of March that arrangements were in place for the Twins’ visit to New York on which, apparently, so much depended.

  Until now, Reg had reluctantly gone along with the idea of the trip. But at the last minute he refused to go. Why should they trust their lives to somebody like Cooper? How could Ron be certain that the whole thing wasn’t just a trap?

  There was a time when Ron would have listened to his brother and finally backed off. But now that he’d set his heart on going to America his voices told him that he was safe and he was determined to go through with it.

  ‘You’re just bein’ babyish,’ he said to Reg. ‘An’ if you’re frightened of a cunt like Cooper I’m sorry for you. Any’ow I’ve never seen New York. I think it’s time I did.’

  *

  On 5 April Alan Bruce Cooper collected Ron from Braithwaite House in the Rolls and drove him to Heathrow. Since Reg was still determined to stay out of this, Dickie Morgan, one of the Twins’ oldest friends and a founder member of The Firm, took his place. None of what followed could have happened without the close cooperation of the US Secret Service, but because of the Admiral’s status in the US Paris embassy everything went smoothly from the start. At Orly Airport they were waved through passport control and Customs, and outside a hired car was waiting to take them to the Hotel Frontenac in the heart of Paris.

  ‘Ron, how d’you like being a VIP?’ Cooper asked him. Ron muttered that he liked it very much.

  For Ron at any rate his one-night stay in Paris was a great success. For some time Cooper had been spinning him a succession of elaborate fantasies of how the Firm could link up with the formidable Corsican Mafia, the Union Corse, and that afternoon he introduced him to the Corsican gangster who directed the Union’s operations in Paris. In fact he wasn’t really Corsican at all but a middle-aged Sicilian called Ricardo who had done time in San Quentin but since settling in France had earned a living as a supporting actor in a succession of French gangster movies. He had also helped the Admiral out on various occasions.

  Whatever else he was, Ricardo was a famous talker. He spoke good English, Cooper had briefed him over what to say, and for the rest of the evening he kept Ron enthralled with his tales of violence and murder. He also talked of how Ron and his allies could cooperate with members of the Union Corse, with Corsican hit men flying in to London for the day to carry out a killing before taking the evening plane back to Corsica. Ron was enormously impressed.

  Next morning, as soon as the US Consulate was open, Cooper took Ron and Dickie Morgan along with their passports to be stamped with entry visas to the USA. Again there were no problems and no questions asked, nor were there any problems when Cooper took them on to a travel agent near the embassy where return tickets to New York were waiting for them in their names along with reservations on a midday flight.

  Morgan asked how all this had happened so smoothly.

  ‘Our Mafia friends are very powerful,’ Cooper answered.

  Later all three of them took a taxi back to Orly airport where they boarded a midday flight to New York.

  Once again everything went smoothly – possibly a bit too smoothly, for Ron was hardly likely to forget his previous reception by the US Immigration Service. But this time everything was so relaxed that, when they were safely in a taxi heading for the centre of New York, Morgan turned to Ron and asked, ‘What’s going on, Ron? I thought the Ya
nks hated you.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ve just got lucky,’ Ron replied.

  ‘Don’t let it worry you,’ said Cooper.

  Once again everything was carefully arranged. Cooper had booked three separate rooms in the downtown Warwick Hotel, and next morning after breakfast he spent a lot of time with Ron, helping him telephone all the top members of the Mafia he knew. All three rooms in the Warwick had of course been carefully bugged and every word they uttered was recorded. Ron did his best to contact members of the Mob in Chicago and Las Vegas, but all of them had clearly got the message and nobody replied. The same thing happened when he rang Judy Garland, using the number Reg had given him. But when he gave his name the maid replied that Miss Garland was out of town. It was the same when he rang Meyer Lansky in Las Vegas to suggest a meeting. The only real meeting that he managed to set up was with Frank Taylor who was somewhat mystified to find Ron in the centre of New York but who told him of a lot of interest in proposals for their film from Hollywood and that he had heard good reports of the progress of their book.

  Cooper had foreseen this happening and was prepared for this eventuality. As in Paris, he had taken no chances and during a recent visit to New York had hired several actors to play the part of mafiosi and had spent some time while he was there rehearsing them.

  Even so, for Cooper it must have been a nightmare keeping Ron occupied and happy and at the same time trying to arrange for him to meet high-ranking members of the Mafia. The only genuine gangsters within fifty miles were Crazy Joe Gallo and his bodyguard Frank Illiano, who out of bravado or curiosity put in a brief appearance at the Warwick just to check on what was happening.

  Joe Gallo didn’t stay around for long, but Frank Illiano was obviously intrigued by Ron and spent quite some time with him explaining how rival gangs were organised in New York and what lessons he could learn from them. Ron was impressed and to show his gratitude gave him his platinum and diamond ring as a keepsake. Cooper also managed to arrange for Ron to meet a retired member of the Mafia who claimed to be working as a bodyguard to the Mayor of New York and who talked for hours about Ron’s hero, Al Capone, and the St.Valentine’s massacre. This time Ron was so impressed that he gave him his gold Rolex.

  But apart from them, Cooper clearly had his work cut out keeping Ron and Dickie Morgan happy and spent a lot of time showing them Brooklyn and Harlem and Skid Row, introducing them to various old time criminals he seemed to know. He also took them to Coney Island , which Ron enjoyed enormously, and met several of Cooper’s actor friends who had specially briefed in advance. Between them they all put on a most convincing show, but it meant that instead of conferring with important members of the mafia, as the Admiral had intended, Ron was actually meeting a succession of washed up gangsters, dead beat con men and actors carefully rehearsed by Cooper to play the part of killers.

  ‘Anyone else you’d like to meet while you’re here?’ Cooper asked him. ‘Only that coloured boy behind the reception desk,’ he answered.

  By the fourth day of the trip Cooper was still trying hard to fix up something more impressive to satisfy the Secret Service, but Ron decided he had seen enough of little old New York and told him he was going back to London.

  History does not relate how the Admiral subsequently explained this extraordinary business to his superiors in the Treasury Department back in Washington, although to have survived so long in the world of high intelligence he must have had a lot of practice dealing with disasters. In spite of this, by any estimation Ron Kray’s New York City break should have a place as the most expensive fiasco ever staged around a homicidal madman in the history of the US Secret Service. But the strangest thing of all in this very strange affair is that in the end it brought results and through a succession of accidents and misunderstandings that followed led to a decisive moment in the downfall of the Twins by giving Nipper Read the lucky break he needed.

  What happened was that while Cooper was making such desperate efforts to keep Ron occupied and happy by meeting all those deadbeat gangsters and criminal has-beens in New York, not to mention the actors he employed to play the part of mafiosi, Ron had been enormously impressed by what they told him. Just as he believed Ricardo’s promises to fly in contract killers from Corsica, so he really took to heart the stories he was hearing about organised crime in America. What particularly excited him were Frank Illiano’s stories of how in America criminals used car bombs and explosives to destroy their enemies. Once he was safely back with Reg, he couldn’t wait to put these ideas into practice.

  As du Rose had known all about the trip from the beginning I wondered why he didn’t choose this moment to come clean with Nipper Read. But how could he make such a devastating revelation when all it did was end in failure? To have done so would have broken trust with Hanly and the US Secret Service. So Cooper was left to get on with the next episode in his life as an agent provocateur, with Ron even more excited and dangerous than ever.

  Only a madman such as Ron could have appreciated lunacy on the scale of the New York tour that the US Secret Service specially arranged for him; and the ultimate irony of Ron’s costly four-day visit there at the expense of the US Treasury Department was that all those conversations he had had with actors ad libbing the part of criminals and the interviews he had with deadbeat gangsters instructing him on how to organise a gangland murder had excited and inspired him as little ever had before. Far from feeling cheated by his trip, he returned excited and inspired by the boundless possibilities it offered him for killing people. He couldn’t wait to tell Reg to get in touch with Ricardo in Paris, and he talked excitedly to Cooper of his plans for bringing death and terror to the streets of London.

  What particularly excited him were the lethal possibilities of the latest weapon of the IRA and the Sicilian Mafia which Illiano had talked to him about – killing by car bomb. Here Elvey, as a skilled electrician, was in his element at last as he explained how a bomb could be wired into the ignition of a victim’s car.

  And yet, amazingly, there was yet more of this murderous make-believe to come. For after the fiasco in New York, Cooper found himself being pressured more than ever from both sides – by the Admiral to get proof at all cost that could lead to an arrest and end his whole adventure with the Twins, and by Ron to get Elvey working on the car bombs which he was now excitedly imagining would blow up his enemies.

  Ron was keener still on action, and had taken Cooper for a drive round Soho where he pointed out a man call Ed Caruana who he wanted murdered to impress another club owner called Silvers. He asked Cooper for the dynamite.

  In the state that he was in Ron wouldn’t take no for an answer and, under pressure from a now desperate Cooper, Du Rose went along with him and agreed that Elvey should be sent to Glasgow to collect the dynamite. After the fiasco of New York, this would be something they could really pin on Ron, though whether they intended to catch him just before he blew up Caruana or intended to wait until there were bodies littering the streets of London I was never able to discover.

  At around this time, one of the Mills brothers who had recently become a reliable informant from The Firm reported back to Nipper, warning him that his life could be in danger since his name was on Ron Kray’s list of people he was planning to destroy – along with Caruana – with one of the car bombs which Elvey was busily creating in his garden shed for Ron’s big offensive.

  Having informed du Rose what he was up to, Cooper sent Elvey off by plane to Edinburgh with instuctions to go on to Glasgow, collect the dynamite from a certain Gorbals gangster, and immediately then fly back with it to London.

  By now Nipper had been given permission by the Home Office to tap systematically into the telephone conversations of the Twins and members of The Firm, which was how he heard that an associate of the Twins called Cooper was sending an emissary called Elvey by air to Glasgow to collect what was described as ‘some dodgy gear’ and bring it back to London. Knowing that there were close connections between the
Krays and gangs in Glasgow, Nipper asked the local CID to put a tail on Elvey and report what happened. The result was more sensational than Nipper could ever have expected. Elvey was seen meeting a known Glasgow criminal outside a pub and returning to the airport with a holdall. He was followed and arrested as he was just about to board the plane to London. Inside the holdall were two dozen sticks of dynamite.

  At last the the farce was over. Like two cars on a collision course, the two separate investigations to catch the Twins had finally collided.

  Everything happened very quickly now. Nipper flew instantly to Scotland where he and his deputy Archie Hemingway grilled Elvey until he finally broke down and put the blame on Cooper. Then it was Cooper’s turn to face the music. Back in London he was arrested and brought to Tintagel House but when Nipper repeated Elvey’s allegations he angrily denied them.

  ‘Fine,’ said Nipper.’ Then I’m charging you with conspiracy to murder.’

  But Cooper’s answer was hardly what Nipper Read expected.

  ‘I want to see John du Rose,’ he said

  ‘What has Commander du Rose got to do with it?’ said Nipper. To which Cooper delivered a reply which Nipper Read could not believe.

  ‘If you contact John du Rose he will tell you that I have been working as his informant for the last two years and have been spying on the Krays.’

  Nipper Read has never said what happened next when he confronted John du Rose and it was not until twenty-five years later that he so much as mentioned the incident in his memoirs. Nipper was always nobly discreet in his account of what he said to John du Rose and Scotland Yard was said to ‘consume its own smoke in a crisis’. Certainly du Rose must have swallowed an awful lot of smoke in Nipper’s office. Another cover-up occurred, and not a hint of what had really happened even faintly reached the press.