Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  ‘It would depend upon the volume and the strength of the solution. Two cubic centimetres of a two per cent solution would be fatal. In fact, something less than that would probably be fatal too.’

  ‘And would you say that this mechanism of the suitcase used in conjunction with the hydrogen cyanide was a viable way of killing someone?’

  ‘Most certainly.’

  ‘And what would the victim know?’

  ‘He wouldn’t necessarily know anything, provided the needle were sharp enough.’

  ‘And if this mechanism had been used, would the cyanide have been easily detected by a coroner upon examination?’

  ‘In my opinion, no. It would probably have been accepted as death through natural causes.’

  ‘Are you saying that at a post-mortem examination one could not necessarily detect a dose of hydrogen cyanide?’

  ‘Only if you’d had a strong suspicion that it was there already. The rapidity with which cyanide works would make it more likely than most poisons to resemble a heart attack. And if someone suddenly dropped dead, that’s what you’d probably suspect.’

  As Professor Camps concluded his evidence, the silence in the court was palpable. Against evidence like this, little else really mattered – certainly not any questions of what Cooper had actually been up to with the Twins. His relationship with Admiral Hanly or with John du Rose receded into insignificance. If these were the sort of weapons that the Twins had had at their disposal, no magistrate on Earth – and certainly not one as careful as Mr Kenneth Barraclough – was going to turn them loose upon society.

  In fact, the Bow Street hearings against the Twins and members of the Firm were far from over. Now that Nipper and the prosecution had the initiative they had no intention of surrendering it again, and there would be many more witnesses against the Twins brought before the Bow Street magistrate throughout that summer. But Cooper and Elvey had served their purpose, and for now at any rate the case against the Twins concluded with a neat display of very different evidence from a very different source – the man with the briefcase, Leslie ‘The Brain’ Payne.

  After Professor Camps’s chilling recitation of the possibilities of unsuspected death from cyanide, it was a relief for the court to be able to relax to Payne’s unthreatening account of the complexities of the Twins’ involvement in the European marketing of securities and so-called ‘bearer bonds’ on behalf of the American Mafia, who had stolen them from banks in Canada. As was to be expected from that elegant fraudster, Payne was also a most convincing witness as he explained the operation of the bearer bonds, the size and the potential of the trade, and the code that the Twins and their partners in crime used to keep in touch with the Mafia in New York.

  All this particularly impressed the Twins’ prosecuting counsel, who in his summing-up talked of the Twins handling at least two million dollars’ worth of bonds stolen by the Mafia and used the phrase that hit the headlines of next morning’s press.

  ‘Krays in worldwide plot, says QC.’

  Ever since the Twins had lifted the restrictions on media reporting their interest value was growing by the day. First death by cyanide, then big-time financial operators with a worldwide clientele. And there would be a great deal more to come. For by the conclusion of the Bow Street hearings Nipper Read would have got exactly what he needed. By placing the Krays and accomplices on remand throughout the summer, Kenneth Barraclough had put them in the deep freeze, at least until October, leaving Nipper and the detectives from Tintagel House free from interference as they gathered their witnesses and put together what turned out to be the most elaborate criminal case ever heard at the Old Bailey.

  23

  The Trial of the Century

  THE TRIAL HAD been carefully set up from the start, for with so much at stake it would have been irresponsible of any government to have left its outcome to anything as unreliable as chance.

  Although it was getting on for five years since the Boothby scandal, most of the beneficiaries of Lord Goodman’s cover-up were still very much in power. Boothby’s ‘Little Man’, Harold Wilson, was now prime minister. His ‘Mr Fixit’, Arnold Goodman, who was now ‘Lord Fixit’, had grown larger and more indispensable than ever. Tom Driberg, since his marriage and promotion to the peerage as Lord Bradwell-Juxta-Mare, had given up ‘cottaging’ and was now the influential chairman of the Labour Party. And although the prime minister at the time of the scandal, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, had decided to resume his old identity as Lord Douglas-Home and had retired from politics, he still, as we shall see, retained an interest in the fate and future of the Twins.

  But the responsibility for what ensued still rested largely with the original duo who had so efficiently suppressed that whole outrageous business back in 1964 – the Little Man and the Fat Man, Harold Wilson and Lord Goodman. Clearly it was they who still had most to lose if the faintest flicker of the truth were ever to emerge. In Harold Wilson’s case, his time in office had increased the stresses on his anxious nature – leaving him more suspicious and more conspiratorial than ever.

  For Wilson and for Goodman the prospect of the Kray Twins’ trial must have been particularly disturbing. Hanging the Twins for murder would have solved their problems and guaranteed the Twin’s silence most effectively. But since this was no longer possible, what they desired from the trial was the next-best thing – a chance to eradicate the Twins entirely with a lifelong prison sentence in maximum security and by so doing bring closure to the hushed-up scandal which still haunted the Establishment.

  As the trial was rapidly approaching this called for careful preparations by the government, which at least partially explains the size and the sensational nature of the trial when it finally commenced at the Old Bailey on 7 January 1969. There was, for instance, the vexed problem of evidence. For over a year now Nipper had been assembling his cast of witnesses against the Twins. Early on, in discussions with lawyers from Scotland Yard and the Home Office, he had convinced them that the only way the Twins could ever be arrested was on ‘villains’ evidence’ – most of it from other criminals who would have to be persuaded that it was either safe or profitable to betray them. ‘If it’s necessary to go down into the sewers to get them I’m perfectly prepared to do so,’ he told them. Unlike most policeman, Nipper was good with lawyers and as a result of these discussions he was granted virtual carte blanche to offer even the guiltiest criminals immunity from prosecution if they would turn Queen’s Evidence.

  Such authority on such a scale would have had to have been sanctioned by someone at the highest level of government, which it clearly was, and the result was that promises of immunity from prosecution were granted on a scale unseen before in any major trial in England. The only modern parallels were in the big Mafia show trials currently being held in Italy, which depended almost entirely on the evidence of so-called pentiti – repentant ones – major criminals who were offered a degree of freedom if they would betray still greater criminals.

  During the autumn of 1968, as Nipper and his team at Tintagel House worked busily away preparing for the mammoth trial to come, they soon discovered that the power of forgiveness could work wonders, and brought the most hardened accomplices of the Twins to see the errors of their ways. (Nipper had a well-developed sense of humour, and on one occasion he actually put on a dog collar and disguised himself as the prison chaplain to interview Big Albert Donoghue in Brixton Prison chapel thus ensuring that not a hint of what was happening reached the sharp ears of the Twins.)

  One of the very few potential witnesses whose sense of loyalty was proof against Nipper Read’s temptations was young Christopher Lambrianou whose involvement in McVitie’s murder was fairly marginal and who had spent his time while Jack was being butchered sitting outside on the staircase, weeping. To be fair to Nipper, much as he wanted Lambrianou as a witness he was also anxious to prevent someone so young from being forced to spend a large period of his life in prison. He tried everything he could to convince him no
t to let this happen and was finally so exasperated that he almost hit him. But despite his tendency to tears Chrissie Lambrianou, unlike all the rest of the Twins’ once faithful buddies, had his principles – and stuck to them. And in the end, of course, Nipper Read was proved right. Christopher Lambrianou, like his brother Tony, would serve fifteen years in prison for sticking by the Twins, without receiving so much as a subsequent thank-you for their loyalty.

  Despite the so-called ‘code of silence’ which had ruled the old East End from time immemorial, important members of the Firm – who were far guiltier than the Lambrianous – felt no loyalty whatsoever to the Krays when it came to it, and it was estimated that by the time that Nipper and his team had finished work they had ‘turned’ something approaching twenty-five former friends, associates and perjured witnesses of the Twins in return for immunity from prosecution. Some were lifelong friends of the family like old Charlie’s fellow deserter from the army Harry Hopwood, Ron’s former bodyguard Bill Exley, and Lennie Dunne, the pornographic bookseller whose flat was used to conceal the Axeman after his release from Dartmoor. Some were long-term members of the Firm who had known the Twins from the beginning, colleagues like Dickie Morgan, Tom Berry’s brother, Checker, and my one-time driver, Big Tommy Brown ‘the Bear’.

  Then there were the reluctant witnesses, like Lisa Prescott the hostess from Churchill’s Club, who had slept with the unfortunate ‘Mad Axeman’ Frank Mitchell in Lennie Dunn’s flat in Barking. More important still, Superintendent Mooney had employed his Irish charm to convince Mrs X, the still terrified barmaid from the Blind Beggar, that it was safe for her to come clean at last in court over what had really happened to George Cornell on that fateful evening in the pub. Along with Albert Donoghue, other major figures in the Firm who had been ‘turned’ by the offer of immunity included Scotch Jack Dixon, and Nipper’s greatest catch of all: the Twins’ own cousin, Ronald Hart. Such characters had been so deeply incriminated with the Twins that by betraying them they saved themselves from wasting their best remaining years of life in prison.

  Something else that proved of great importance to the trial was the question of the judge. Normally High Court judges are appointed in strict rotation by the Lord Chief Justice. But this was not a normal trial and since its outcome was so crucial to so many people no one was terribly surprised when the choice fell on the toughest High Court judge of all, the sixty-seven-year-old Sir Aubrey Melford Stevenson.

  A former vicar’s son, Stevenson had made his mark and his money as a young man specialising in libel and divorce. But after switching to the criminal bar, hoping for promotion to the bench, he showed all the zeal of a convert to the cause of law and order. The one thing everyone remembered about him was the name he gave his country house in the old cinq port of Winchelsea – ‘Truncheons’. More significant, as far as the forthcoming Kray trial was concerned, was the part that he had played as defence counsel to Ruth Ellis, the last woman in England to be hanged for murder. While defending her in court he had seemed too much at ease with the prosecution and afterwards was widely blamed for not disputing the judge’s ruling against trying his client for the lesser crime of manslaughter, which would have automatically stopped her going to the gallows.

  Clearly he was just the man to deal with the Twins and their accomplices. He would take no nonsense from them, nor from anybody else, nor would there be any danger of excessive leniency when he came to sentence them. Here again there’d been discussions over the maximum sentences he could give the Twins. Stevenson himself was firmly of the opinion that with such hardened criminals a life sentence should mean just that – for life – but it had been suggested that he might settle for a ‘recommended’ sentence of thirty years in high security. The home secretary of the day could always extend a judge’s ‘recommendation’ if and when he thought it necessary, but a full life sentence might be thought excessive, even for the Twins if the case went to appeal.

  Thanks to the Twins’ own decision to lift reporting restrictions on the remand hearings at Bow Street and the sensational stories that had reached the media as a result – they arrived at the Old Bailey with an aura of unproven but sensational wickedness around them. Those stories had included blowing up their enemies with dynamite, murdering someone with a crossbow and a poisonous suitcase, running a million-dollar empire in stolen securities, and planning to kidnap the Pope. But rather than revive such way-out charges it was decided by the prosecution that the Twins and their accomplices should be charged with the most straightforward cases which would be easier to prove – the blatant murders of George Cornell and Jack McVitie, to be followed in a separate trial over the fate of Frank Mitchell after the Twins had had him freed from Dartmoor.

  When the trial finally began at the Old Bailey on 7 January 1969, Nipper Read could not resist repeating the daily curtain-raiser he had used at Bow Street of whisking the Twins and their colleagues through London in a high-speed convoy with armed guards, flashing lights and a presidential-style escort of police motorcyclists around them. And the trial itself was taking place in that most grandiose theatre of the law – Number One Court at the Old Bailey in the presence of an elderly, frequently bad-tempered gentleman wearing a full-bottomed eighteenth-century wig and scarlet robes and with a symbolic sword of justice and the coat of arms of the City of London set high above him.

  In fact, the two main charges facing the Twins turned out to be fairly run-of-the-murder-mill cases that you might have heard in any major court in England. But thanks to the notoriety of the Krays and the sheer scale of the immunity granted to so many self-confessed criminals in return for their testimony against them it was inevitable that their trial would rapidly become one of the great criminal spectaculars of the century.

  In the first case, the Cornell murder, only two people standing in the dock were actually involved – Ron himself, who was charged with shooting George Cornell at the Blind Beggar, and Ian Barrie for firing the two shots into the ceiling to distract attention which had made him an accessory to the murder.

  The other eight in the dock were all allegedly involved in one way or another in the murder of Jack McVitie: Reg (along with Ron) for killing him, the two Lambrianou brothers, Cornelius Whitehead and the owner of the Regency Club, Tony Barry, as accessories, and the Twins’ older brother Charles together with a recent arrival on the Firm called Ronald Bender and the Twins’ old friend and ally Freddie Foreman for disposing of the body.

  With these ten men in the dock, all facing separate charges for two quite separate murders, there seemed to be an inevitable element of rough justice to the proceedings from the start. Before the trial began in earnest its legality was disputed by Ron’s counsel, the schoolmasterly John Platts-Mills QC, who was briskly overruled by Melford Stevenson. Then, adding insult to injury, the judge introduced a further novelty of his own by ordering everyone in the dock to wear a cardboard number round his neck ‘to help members of the jury to identify them’.

  This produced an angry clash of wills between the judge and the nine accused when they quietly refused and ended by tearing up the numbers and throwing them into the body of the court. This produced an instant show of temper from the judge and his angry exit from the court brought a temporary end to the proceedings.

  But after half an hour spent cooling down in the judge’s room, Sir Aubrey must have realised that not even he could force nine grown men to wear large cardboard numbers round their necks if they didn’t want to. So he finally returned, made no further reference to the incident and the court resumed its business. But there was now a sense of genuine antagonism in the air, and a feeling that the judge would get his own back by the time the trial was over.

  The trial began in earnest with the leading counsel for the prosecution, Kenneth Jones QC, reminding me of a Welsh methodist preacher as he outlined the prosecution case in singing tones. Gone were the days of the murder trials in this very court when silver-tongued barristers used all their skill in cases such as this w
ith the life or death of the accused depending on their barrister’s eloquence. Plump Kenneth Jones did not possess a silver tongue but he did his best to make the case against the Twins as clear as possible. ‘On a Wednesday evening on the ninth of March a man called George Cornell went out for a drink at a pub in the East End called the Blind Beggar. As he was sitting in a corner of the bar he looked up and saw a man holding a pistol. A shot was fired, and Cornell crashed to the ground, mortally wounded in the head.

  ‘Twenty months later on a Saturday evening in October, another man by name Jack McVitie, went to have a drink at a club in Stoke Newington. From there he went on to a party, where waiting for him was another gunman armed with a pistol which failed to fire. Then the gunman attacked him with a knife, while his brother held McVitie and urged him on until McVitie lay on the ground, murdered by the two brothers. The case for the prosecution is that the gunman who made the first attack was Ronald Kray, and that in the second attack the would-be gunman was Reginald Kray, urged on by his brother Ronald.’

  Such were the accusations, and Kenneth Jones would spend the next two days going into a detailed account of both the killings. This was fairly heavy going and it was not until the first of the witnesses entered the witness box that the trial took off and became totally absorbing. Listening to it was like being present at a cross between an extraordinarily bloodthirsty grand opera, and an ongoing version of EastEnders, with ordinary people recounting the dramas and the horrors they had lived through. Some of the descriptions were harrowing in the extreme, and some of the witnesses were clearly lying, which made the drama more interesting. But one thing that struck me from the start was that the most impressive witnesses of all were women. Just as it was the womenfolk who were the real victims of the brutalised world of East End villainy so, as they now recounted their stories to the court, they all emerged as the trial’s unsung heroines.