FBI director Robert Mueller said as much in September 2003, two years after the 9/11 attacks on New York’s Twin Towers, when he asked the public to accept that, with the agency’s new focus on counter-terrorism, ‘please recognise that we can’t do everything’. But the notion that 9/11 dimmed the Mafia’s intent soon proved deluded. Members of New York’s Lucchese family were found guilty of extorting pay-offs from a company engaged in the removal of debris from the World Trade Center. And the rival Bonanno family tried unsuccessfully to steal scrap metal from the ruins of the Twin Towers.
So any romantic view of the Mafia as just another episode in America’s sometimes violent past is fallacious. Attorney and law professor George Robert Blakey, the principal author of the RICO Act that put so many gangsters in prison, warned: ‘We don’t win a war against the Mob; all we can do is contain it. Keeping a boxer down is easier than knocking him down a second time. By withdrawing resources, we’ll just have to go back and complete the job at a larger cost.’
CHAPTER 10
AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE BETWEEN WARTIME VILLAINS
Gangsters elsewhere in the world tend not to have quite the same ‘glamorous’ image as American mobsters. Maybe it’s in the names. It’s difficult to compete with the anti-heroes of previous chapters, like ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Jimmy ‘The Weasel’ Fratianno, Carmine ‘Wagon Wheels’ Fatico or Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn. Britain’s underworld is nowadays short of descriptive nicknames – but it wasn’t always like that.
A little short of a century ago, Britain’s underworld boasted quaint characters like gems thief Joseph ‘Cammie’ Grizzard and drugs smugglers ‘Brilliant’ Chang and ‘Sess’ Miyakawa. There were hard men like ‘Jew Jack the Chopper King’, ‘Wassie’ Newman, ‘Dodger’ Mullins and ‘Razzle Dazzle’ Dalziel. Through the Twenties and Thirties, Soho was controlled by vice king ‘Papa’ Pasquale and North London was terrorised by Darby Sabini, labelled by the Press as ‘Britain’s leading gangster’. South of the Thames lurked the Elephant and Castle Mob, while in the Midlands the Brummagen Boys held sway. A famous cat burglar of the day was a man named ‘Ruby’ Sparks, aided by his getaway driver, a beauty known only as the ‘Bobbed Hair Bandit’.
Prostitution was big business between the wars, the principal racketeers usually being immigrants – Latvian ‘Red Max’ Kessel, Frenchman Casimere Micheletti and Spaniard Juan Castanar, with their henchmen Charlie ‘the Acrobat’ and ‘Mad Emile’ Berthier. After World War Two the three Messina Brothers, of mixed Sicilian, Maltese and Egyptian descent, took over the London vice trade. Their best night’s business was on VE Day 1945 when, it was faithfully recorded, one girl alone serviced 49 revellers.
But among all these exotically named villains of the past were two hoodlums who stood out as masters of post-war gangland: Jack ‘Spot’ Comer and William ‘Billy’ Hill. They were, at different times, close friends and bitter rivals. And both claimed the title ‘King of the Underworld’.
There are differing versions of how Spot gained his nickname of which he was so proud. As a youth, he was constantly getting into ‘a spot of bother’. Later in life, as a protection-racket enforcer, he was always ‘on the spot’ to sort out trouble from rivals. Or it might have been because of the mole on his face. The son of Polish Jews who had come to Britain in the 1890s, Spot was born Jacob Comacho in Whitechapel, in London’s East End, on 12 April 1912. The name he used changed to Colmore, then Comer, then simply Jack Spot. He gained an early reputation as a street fighter and, with anti-Semitism rife in the Thirties, was paid retainers by Jewish shopkeepers, stallholders and illegal bookmakers to protect them from thugs. He became a local hero when in 1936 he helped East-Enders break up a march through the area by Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts. But by then, Spot was combining community protection with full-scale protection rackets, concentrating on the illicit gambling clubs that flourished both in the East End and the more lucrative West End of London.
His criminal career was interrupted in 1940 when Spot and some of his cronies were conscripted into the Army. For three years he fought the system and, avoiding any sort of military action, was discharged as mentally unstable. He returned to the East End to find his parents dead and much of his home territory devastated by the Blitz. Spot tried to pick up his old business but after an attack on a rival led to a warrant for his arrest, he fled to Leeds, then the black market capital of the North. There he worked as a minder around Leeds and Newcastle, helping other gangsters beat or intimidate businessmen out of their nightclubs, gambling dens or racecourse pitches. He returned to London enriched and set himself up in offices in the West End.
According to Scotland Yard Inspector Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read: ‘Spot epitomised everything about the old-time Mafia-style gangster. He always looked the part. Immaculately dressed, wearing a brown fedora hat, he would come out of his flat every morning and cross the road to the barbers where he would be given a shave and a hair trim. Then he would march down the Edgware Road receiving the accolades of the local business owners, and take his usual table in the Cumberland Hotel, where he would receive ‘guests’ in much the same way as Don Corleone did in The Godfather.’
But Spot had his eyes on rackets further afield. Before World War Two, an Italian gang, the Sabini Brothers, controlled racecourse rackets, setting up the Bookmakers Protection Association. During the war, the Sabinis were interned like other Anglo-Italians and their absence from the tracks allowed other Mobs to move in. Spot, more ruthless and violent than most, gained a near monopoly on the business after pitched battles with rival outfits, which were harassed and attacked with knives, bottles, and machetes.
Spot’s own favourite weapon was the cutthroat razor. ‘My brother was a barber,’ he once said, ‘and I used to get my nice sharp razors from him.’ Taped at one end, they would be used by Spot and his growing gang to ‘chiv’ thugs who tried to muscle in on his territory – although, he boasted, ‘I’d make sure never to cut them through the jugular vein. I didn’t want to be done for murder, did I?’
Spot’s major rivals for the racecourse protection business were the White family, who controlled major southern courses including Ascot, Epsom and Brighton. Their leader, Harry White, had taken over these courses from the Sabinis and was not now going to offer them on a plate to Spot’s Mob. He soon changed his mind. According to a newspaper report of the time: ‘Harry White’s fear of Spot began in January 1947 in a club in Sackville Street, off Piccadilly. He was drinking with one of his henchmen and racehorse trainer Tim O’Sullivan. Spot walked in with ten thugs, went straight up to Harry and said, You’re Yiddified – meaning he was anti-Jewish. White denied it. He said, I have Jewish people among my best friends. Spot wouldn’t listen and hit him with a bottle. As White collapsed in a pool of blood, the rest of Spot’s men attacked O’Sullivan and the third man. O’Sullivan was beaten unconscious and pushed into an open fire. The other man was slashed with razors and stabbed in the stomach.’
The White family were finally routed in a very public battle at Harringay Arena, six months later – after which, Spot later revealed, he was pulled in by a chief superintendent at Scotland Yard and given a warning that gang warfare in the city would not be tolerated. Spot said: ‘I called the heavy mob together at once. I said, “We’ve got to pack it up, so get rid of the ironmongery.” We collected all the Stens, the grenades, revolvers, pistols and ammunition, loaded them onto a lorry and dumped the whole lot into the Thames.’
Spot was now running a lucrative gambling club in Aldgate, a protection racket among the West End clubs and was making a fortune from the races. More fancifully, he also saw himself as ‘the Robin Hood of the East End’, travelling to Leeds, Manchester or Glasgow to beat up villains who threatened Jewish businesses. He even claimed that rabbis would advise their frightened people to call for his services.
Spot’s career almost ended when he organised a £1.25 million gold bullion robbery at Heathrow Airport in July 1948. After coshing sec
urity guards, his ten-man gang were pounced on by police, who arrested eight of them. Spot escaped. So did ‘Franny’ Daniels – by clinging to the underside of a Black Maria, crawling away only when it reached the police station.
In 1949 Spot, believing he needed a tough enforcer to hold his crime empire together, went into partnership with Billy Hill, a notorious hard-man whose eyes were said to be ‘like black glass’. Hill, the son of a Covent Garden ‘fence’, had committed his first stabbing at the age of 14 in 1925. He was a house burglar while still in his teens and graduated to smash-and-grab raids targeting furriers and jewellers in the Thirties. Jack Spot once praised Hill as ‘an out-and-out thief and a very good one – and very good safe blower, too.’
During London’s wartime blackout, Hill’s gang expanded their business into black marketeering and providing false documents for deserting soldiers. He also cooperated with Spot in West End protection rackets. After the war, Hill went on the run following a warehouse robbery and fled to South Africa, where he briefly ran a gambling club in South Johannesburg. There, his reputation was enhanced when he silenced a rival by slicing him from head to toe with a razor, leaving the man needing 100 stitches. Arrested by South African police, he jumped bail and returned to Britain, where he gave himself up and was sent to jail.
On his release in 1949, Jack Spot was waiting outside the gates of Wandsworth Prison, southwest London, to offer him a partnership. The two gang leaders settled down as ‘businessmen’, living well on the proceeds of their rackets in West London. They left the vice trade to the Maltese Messina Brothers, who ran Soho’s sex industry. Spot concentrated on his gaming and racecourse ‘protection’. Hill was more adventurous, though. In 1952 he stole £287,000 (the equivalent of more than £6 million today) in used banknotes from a Post Office van in Paddington and in 1954 he organised a £45,000 gold bullion heist in Holborn. In neither case was any of the money recovered.
Hill also funded a drug smuggling operation from Morocco, where he owned a nightclub. It was run by his wife, an ex-prostitute known as ‘Gipsy’ Riley. He had fallen for her after his release from prison, and when her ex-pimp, ‘Belgian Johnny’, tried to force her back on the streets, he cornered him in a restaurant and carved his face to shreds. Hill later described his expert use of the razor-sharp knife he usually carried: ‘I was always careful to draw my knife down on the face, never across or upwards. Always down. So that if the knife slips you don’t cut an artery. After all, chivving is chivving, but cutting an artery is usually murder. Only mugs do murder.’
Both Spot and Hill were planning their retirement by 1953 – the same year that they met a pair of violent young East End twins, Ronnie and Reginald Kray. The old and new guard got involved in a few joint enterprises before Spot and Hill fell out. Each of them was keen to be recognised as ‘King of the Underworld’ and the crunch came when Billy Hill achieved celebrity status first.
In September 1954 ‘The Amazing Confessions of Billy Hill’ were serialised in The People newspaper. The newspaper’s renowned crime man Duncan Webb had ghosted Hill’s biography, immodestly titled Boss of Britain’s Underworld, in which Hill was described as ‘a crook, a villain, a thief, a thug’ – but also strangely as ‘a genius and a kind and tolerant man’. In his memoirs, Hill boasted of organising the bullion robbery in Holborn the previous year and spoke of his 1952 Paddington mailbag heist.
Jack Spot was furious. Spot blamed not only Hill but also Duncan Webb for the unwelcome publicity about the gang’s previous crimes. He invited Webb to a pub meeting and beat him up with a knuckleduster; he also retaliated by giving his own version of events to the Press. He said: ‘I made Billy Hill. He wrote to me when he was in jail, wanted me to help him. Then he got to be top over me. If it wasn’t for me he’d never have got there. I should have shot Billy Hill, I really should.’
A string of court appearances followed as Spot tried in vain to reassert his authority. For the attack on Webb, he was fined a modest £50 for grievous bodily harm. For an unprovoked attack on another rival, his ex-bodyguard Albert Dimes, Spot was charged with instigating the affray, attempting to pervert the course of justice and with perjury. With off-course betting about to be legalised and suffering mass defections of his troops to Hill, Spot faced bankruptcy.
But Billy Hill was not yet finished with him. One night in May 1956 Jack and his wife Rita were strolling outside their Bayswater home when they were attacked by a gang armed with coshes, knives and razors. Spot needed 78 stitches and a blood transfusion. He knew his assailants but refused to name them. Rita, however, gave evidence and three of them – all Hill henchmen, including the feared ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser – were sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.
Following the murderous street attack, Spot moved to Ireland in fear of his former partner. Hill briefly prospered as a Kray mentor but sank into depression and died alone at the age of 73 in 1984. Spot, who described Hill as ‘the richest man in the graveyard’, died, aged 83, in 1996. Their ‘manors’ had long been taken over. For just as those self-styled ‘Kings of the Underworld’ had fought their way to the top, so younger, hungrier and more vicious figures arose to fill the void created by their downfall.
CHAPTER 11
THE GANGLAND CURSE OF THE CRUEL KRAYS
In a reign of terror that marred the memory of the ‘Swinging Sixties’, Ronnie and Reggie Kray became the most notorious gangland bosses of London’s underworld. The twins’ merciless violence silenced rivals and bred respect by fear. Their tight control of the East End also, oddly, earned them local loyalty, some regarding them as ‘Robin Hood’ characters who maintained gangland peace and kept the seedy streets safe.
In their heyday, they were photographed with the famous, fêted by showbiz personalities and were generous in their support of charities. They were also feared like no other criminals of the time. In every way, they were a British version of America’s Thirties’ gangsters, whose exploits they studied and copied slavishly.
Ronnie and Reggie were born on 17 October 1933, at Hoxton in the East End of London. Ronnie was the elder; Reggie arrived 45 minutes later. They also had an older brother, Charles. The boys had Jewish, Irish and Romany blood in their veins. Their father Charles, who was 25 at the time of the twins’ birth, was a dealer in old cloth, silver and gold. Their mother Violet was just 21. Shortly before the outbreak of World War Two, the family moved a brief distance to one of the toughest, most run-down areas of Bethnal Green, soon to become even more dilapidated, thanks to visits from the Luftwaffe. Ronnie and Reggie became known as the Terrible Twins because of their love of fighting, at first with fists and later with bicycle chains and flick-knives.
By the age of 16, they were carrying guns. A year later, they made their first appearance in court. They were accused of seriously beating up a 16-year-old rival but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.
The boys were fighters in every sense. At 17, they became professional boxers and it looked at that stage as if their route to the top would be via the ring. They had been taught their pugilistic skills by brother Charlie, who had joined the Royal Navy and won a reputation as a forces boxer. When on leave, he hung a canvas kit bag from a ceiling of their home and let the twins use it as a punch bag.
In the spring of 1952 the twins received their call-up papers for National Service and joined the Royal Fusiliers. But only a few hours into their Army careers, Ronnie punched the recruiting corporal on the nose. Their subsequent military service was remarkable for their violence, serious trouble with the military authorities and periods in custody. Following dishonourable discharge in 1954, they went into the ‘protection’ business. If a bookmaker, store or club owner wanted to ensure ‘troublemakers’ did not target his establishment, a weekly payment to the twins would do the trick. As the easy money rolled in, so their gang of collectors grew. Their territory covered the East End and much of North London. They founded their own clubs, at first in the East End, where a sports hall provided a front for their
rackets, and later in fashionable Knightsbridge, where the West End found the pair a rough-and-ready attraction.
Ronnie, who was known as ‘the Colonel’, had a brutal and unstable nature which Reggie, ‘the Quiet One’ with a good business brain, tried to keep under control. Still operating from their modest home in Vallance Road, known locally as ‘Fort Vallance’, the Krays could be magnanimous, loyal and charming. They could also be frighteningly, unpredictably brutal – a trait mainly initiated by Ronnie, who would egg his brother on to prove himself by being as tough as his twin.
The swaggering Ronnie was in trouble with the law again in 1955 when he shot a man in the leg. Ronnie had gone to confront the victim, a local dock worker, who was demanding his money back from a car dealer, who was paying the twins for ‘protection’. By the time Ronnie tracked him down, the docker had changed his mind and wanted to keep the car – but Ronnie shot him anyway. He was subsequently arrested and picked out at an identity parade but avoided being charged by claiming he was Reggie, thus making nonsense of the evidence.
The following year, Ronnie was re-arrested and this time convicted. He received a three-year sentence for stabbing a man with a bayonet in a raid on a rival gang’s territory. Having Ronnie locked up was, ironically, good news for the Krays’ businesses. In his brother’s absence, Reggie expanded the rackets and sought new clubs in which to invest.
But inside prison, Ronnie’s dangerous instability became apparent. He grew obsessively fearful that someone was trying to kill him – he even had to be shown his own reflection in a mirror to prove he was still in one piece. Finally, in December 1957, after receiving news that a favourite aunt had died, Ronnie went berserk. He spent a night in a straitjacket and the following morning was certified insane and sent to a mental hospital.
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 11