Long Hill psychiatric unit in leafy Epsom, Surrey, was no high-security prison. One Sunday, Reggie paid a visit and swapped clothes with his brother. When Ronnie was safely away, Reggie owned up to the stunt but was not prosecuted. Ronnie remained free for some weeks, during which time his sense of bravado induced him to make surprise calls on East End pubs to taunt the police. But his strange state of mind worried his family and, after a suicide attempt, they allowed the police to recapture him and he was returned to prison. After further treatment, he was deemed fit to be released in the spring of 1958.
Now the duo could enjoy the riches that Reggie had been accumulating while his brother was ‘inside’. Reggie had a good business brain and the family’s commercial enterprises had flourished during Ronnie’s spell in jail. There was the original Double R Club in Bow, a new club in Stratford, a car sales business and even an illegal gambling club a stone’s throw away from Bow police station. But the unpredictable Ronnie was far from cured and no one knew it better than Reggie, who realised that a return to heavy-handed gangsterism would be bad for business.
The pair argued about the running of their ‘firm’, but when in 1960 Reggie was jailed for 18 months for demanding money with menaces, it was his brother’s turn to have a free hand at the family business. Ronnie took a contract from the notorious slum landlord of the time, Peter Rachman. The Krays’ hoodlums would guard Rachman’s rent collectors in return for a healthy commission. The result was not only added riches for Ronnie but an introduction to a more upmarket circle of acquaintances. His new Knightsbridge club, Esmerelda’s Barn, became a favourite rendezvous for sportspeople and entertainers like world heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, singer Judy Garland and film stars George Raft and Diana Dors.
Esmerelda’s Barn also became a haven for young men willing to sell their bodies – a clientele encouraged by Ronnie, who was by now openly homosexual. Reggie was otherwise inclined. After being freed from prison in 1961, he fell for a 16-year-old East End girl, Frances Shea, whom he married in 1965. Tragically, she suffered Reggie’s strange way of life for just two years before committing suicide.
The brothers’ lifestyles were now widely different. Ronnie veered towards his ‘Swinging Sixties’ West End friends while Reggie returned to his East End roots. Suffering the strain of his failed marriage, Reggie seemed no longer able to control the Al Capone fantasy world of brother Ronnie, and the reputation of the Krays became even more brutal in the second half of the Sixties. There were beatings, brandings and knifings. One former friend who drunkenly insulted Ronnie needed 70 stitches to face wounds. There were also at least three unsuccessful attempts on the Krays’ lives, and Ronnie took to sleeping with a gun under his pillow.
In December 1965 the Krays felt they needed the protection of an especially violent bodyguard, Frank Mitchell, known as ‘the Mad Axeman’, whom Ronnie had met in Wandsworth Prison back in 1956. Mitchell was now in top-security Dartmoor Prison – from which the twins helped him escape. They supplied him with a flat as a hiding place but eventually found him not only violent but unstable. He disappeared. The Krays were subsequently cleared of his murder but the body was never found. Another member of ‘the Firm’, Freddie Foreman, later revealed that Mitchell was shot and his corpse dumped at sea.
The main reason for springing Mitchell had been a flare-up of warfare between the Krays and rival gangsters Charles and Eddie Richardson, based in South London but intent on muscling in on West End protection rackets. George Cornell, a small-time ‘heavy’ working for the Richardsons, had allegedly upset Ronnie Kray by calling him ‘a big fat poof’. One March evening in 1966 Cornell strayed into Kray territory and was perched on a stool in Whitechapel’s Blind Beggar pub when Ronnie arrived with two henchmen. Cornell remarked: ‘Well, look what the dog’s brought in!’ Ronnie walked calmly to the bar and, as he later described, ‘put a gun at his head, looked him in the eyes and pulled the trigger. His body fell off the stool and I walked out.’ Later he justified the murder by saying: ‘Cornell was vermin. He was a drunkard and a bully. He was simply nothing. I done the Earth a favour ridding it of him.’
The following year, Reggie made his own violent contribution to the murder statistics. By then, the brothers’ business had expanded to drugs and pornography, areas that did not endear them to their traditional East End friends. Ronnie’s homosexual proclivities were the talk of their ‘manor’, quite apart from his now obvious paranoia. Meanwhile, the more moderate Reggie had taken to drink since his wife’s suicide, and when fired up with alcohol, he would take pot-shots at the legs of people who offended him.
The Krays were becoming bad news. Their instability was damaging their image as reliable ‘protection’ racketeers. To restore their reputation, they decided to hold a very public test of their 150-strong gang’s loyalty – a meaningless murder. The victim was to be Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, so called because of the hat he wore to hide his baldness. McVitie’s crime was to owe the brothers £500 and to have insulted them in their absence during a drunken binge. Four of the Krays’ men lured McVitie to a ‘party’ in a borrowed house in Stoke Newington, where Ronnie, Reggie and two henchmen lay in wait. As their victim entered, he realised his impending fate and turned to flee.
Ronnie pinned him against a wall and told him: ‘Come on, Jack, be a man.’ McVitie said: ‘I will be a man but I don’t want to die like one.’ Ronnie led him into a basement room, where the killing became near farcical. As McVitie walked through the door, Reggie pointed a pistol at his head and pulled the trigger. But the gun did not fire. Ronnie then picked up a carving knife and thrust it at McVitie’s back but it failed to pierce his thick coat. McVitie made a dash for the window. He dived through, only to be grabbed by his feet and hauled back in. Ronnie pinioned his arms from behind and screamed at his brother: ‘Kill him, Reg! Do it. Don’t stop now!’ Reggie picked up the knife and stabbed his pleading victim in the face and then through the throat. The knife passed through his gullet and pinned him to the floor. McVitie’s body was never found.
The twins planned three more ‘hits’ – the first steps in their formation of a ‘Murder Incorporated’ style organisation along the lines of the American model. A witness at an Old Bailey trial was to be killed by a crossbow or a syringe of cyanide. A Maltese club owner was to have his car bombed. A gambler who owed money to a Kray associate in Las Vegas was also to be eliminated.
However, a Scotland Yard team led by Detective Superintendent Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read was now watching every move the gang made. Read’s case against the Krays was not strong but he knew that unless the twins were safely behind bars, prospective witnesses would suffer ‘loss of memory’ or would simply vanish. Then the police got lucky. A Kray associate was stopped while about to board a plane from Glasgow to London. He was carrying four sticks of dynamite, presumably destined for the Maltese club-owner’s car. Detectives raided his home and found the crossbow and briefcase complete with poisonous syringe.
On the night of 8 May 1968 Ronnie and Reggie went drinking at the Old Horn pub in Bethnal Green. They continued on to the Astor Club in fashionable Berkeley Square, Reggie having brought along a young lady while Ronnie enjoyed the company of a young man. They all returned to their mother’s new council flat in Shoreditch at four in the morning. An hour later, at dawn, Read’s men used a sledgehammer to open the door of the apartment – a particularly startling awakening for the boyfriend in Ronnie’s bed.
The twins were charged with the murders of George Cornell and Jack McVitie. Eight other members of their ‘firm’, including their brother Charlie, were charged with various lesser crimes. The twins pleaded not guilty but after a sensational 39-day trial at the Old Bailey, they were jailed for life with a recommendation that they should serve no less than 30 years. They were 35 years of age when the trial ended on 8 March 1969, which meant that they would be pensioners before they ever had the chance of being released.
Ronnie and Reggie were sent to separate top-security priso
ns. In 1972 they were briefly reunited at Parkhurst jail on the Isle of Wight. But in 1979 Ronnie was again certified and sent to Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane. Reggie found his sentence harder to take than his brother. He was classified as a Category A prisoner: highly dangerous and liable to escape. Shadowed at all times by two prison officers, his movements were monitored and his visits were screened and limited. While of Category A status, no parole board could consider his case. All his appeals fell on deaf ears. In 1982 he unsuccessfully attempted suicide by cutting his wrists.
Ronnie was luckier in his time behind bars. Being an inmate of Broadmoor, he was allowed more privileges than his brother. He received visits from old East End associates and from showbusiness and sporting friends. They brought him parcels of food from Harrods – smoked salmon and game pie – and classical records for the hi-fi in his cell. He also had a colour television set.
The brutal twin would regale visitors with details of his exploits in the days when he and his brother wrote headlines in blood. In 1983 the self-justifying gangster told a visiting journalist: ‘We never hurt ordinary members of the public. We only took money off other villains and gave a bundle of that away to decent people who were on hard times. I look back on those days and naturally remember the good times. Then people could take ladies into pubs with them without the risk of their being insulted. Old people didn’t get mugged either. It couldn’t have happened when we were looking after the East End.’
Of life in Broadmoor, he said: ‘There are some really bad ones in here. But they are all some mother’s sons – and that’s where the heartbreak is. Because no matter what they’ve done or how they’ve been, the mothers don’t stop coming and don’t stop loving them. When I see these mums, I feel really sorry for them having to come here.’
In 1982 the twins’ strongest link with the outside world ended. Their most constant visitor, their mother Violet, died one week before her 73rd birthday. Violet Kray had become an East End legend in her own right and is said to have been the only person on earth who had any control over her boys. Ronnie and Reggie were allowed out for a day to attend her funeral, which was turned into a star-studded East End occasion.
Reggie said after his return to Parkhurst jail: ‘It’s so lonely without visits from our mum. They were always the best ones. I shall miss her so much. Through the funeral, Ronnie and I were handcuffed to police officers who must have been 6ft 3in tall. But they needn’t have worried. Violence is not part of my life anymore. I get angry when I read about the way things are in the East End nowadays. Like those attacks on old ladies. Years ago, if we saw an old lady we would help her across the road and wish her goodnight. Now they rape 80-year-old women and kill them for their pension. It makes me sick.’
Of the hopelessness of life in jail, he said: ‘You can so easily give up after these years. They have passed quickly. But it is only when I see the youngsters come in here that I realise what a terrible waste of life it is.’
It was a lesson that the Kray brothers had not fully learned, however. Elder brother Charlie Kray had been released from prison in 1975 after serving seven years. But he was back in jail in 1997 after a police sting proved his part in a conspiracy to smuggle cocaine worth £69million. He died of natural causes in prison on 4 April 2000.
Five years earlier, Charlie had been on hand to comfort brother Reggie when the latter was allowed out of prison to attend the funeral of Ronnie Kray, who was 61 when he died on 17 March 1995 after collapsing on his ward at Broadmoor mental hospital.
The last of the Kray brothers to pass into history was Reggie. Aged 66 and suffering from inoperable bladder cancer, he was freed on compassionate grounds in September 2000 and moved from Wayland Prison, Norfolk, to a Norwich hospital. There, he invited a BBC TV crew to interview him, and surprised them by confessing to a previously unknown murder. Although he did not name the victim, it was thought to be Edward ‘Mad Teddy’ Smith, who had been missing since 1967. Explaining why he murdered Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, he said he thought him ‘very uncouth and vexatious to the spirit’. During the one-hour documentary Kray refused to give a fulsome apology for his violent behaviour. He said: ‘It is very difficult to apologise in some cases but not in others. I suppose if I’ve been a bit too violent over the years I make some apologies about it, but there’s little I can do about it now, so again it’s no good reflecting back. It’s pointless, negative.’
In the final days of his life, he booked into the bridal suite of a local hotel with his wife Roberta, whom he had married in jail in 1997. She maintained a bedside vigil until his death ten days later on 1 October 2000. He was finally reunited with his twin, being buried alongside Ronnie in Chingford Mount Cemetery.
In the media circus that followed Reggie’s death, his lawyer Mark Goldstein described the Krays as ‘icons of the twentieth century’. A less florid epitaph would have been the words of the Old Bailey judge, Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, in sentencing them in 1969, when he told them with scornful understatement: ‘In my view society has earned a rest from your activities.’
CHAPTER 12
THE TERRIBLE RETRIBUTION OF THE TORTURE GANG
The Krays and their rival gangsters the Richardsons vied with each other for the reputation of being the most monstrous merchants of terror in London. But whereas the Krays, on the north side of the Thames, were infamous for meting out instant vengeance, the Richardson gang, based south of the river, were masters of a slower punishment. Known as the ‘Torture Gang’, their notoriety stems from the penalties for those who fell foul of them, which included beatings, electric shock treatment, extracting teeth with pliers and removing toes with bolt cutters. An added speciality was the use of a building tool called a ‘Spitmatic’ to pin their enemies to the floor with six-inch nails.
Charles Richardson, born in 1934, and brother Edward, two years younger, were raised in Camberwell, Southeast London, where their mother ran a sweet shop. Their father was a feckless rag-and-bone man, who disappeared when the boys were in their teens, leaving the family penniless. Charlie was sent to an approved school at the age of 14, escaping at one time to go on a burglary spree. Released from the school at 16, he acquired a horse and cart and went ‘totting’ for scrap metal. He and Eddie were seen as no more than petty thieves.
But along the way, they built up a string of businesses – some legitimate, others not – throughout South London. Charlie specialised in scrap metal but also ran furniture and fancy goods firms. Eddie operated fruit machines and ran a wholesale chemists’ supply company. But these were fronts for their more profitable lines of trade – fraud, theft, ‘protection’ rackets and receiving stolen goods.
The pair had good business brains and it is a tragedy that they did not concentrate on their legitimate businesses because they could have been comfortably off without ever breaking the law. But that was not their style. Eddie’s fruit machine business, for instance, was more successful than most in the same line. The reason was simple: if a pub or club owner was offered one of Eddie’s machines, he would be wise to accept. If not, he knew his premises would be broken into and vandalised or quite openly smashed up by ‘heavies’ in broad daylight.
Their most masterful moneymaking strokes, however, involved what were known as ‘long firms’, whereby goods would be ordered and quickly sold – then both the goods and the firm would vanish. A company would be set up under a Richardson nominee and begin trading perfectly legitimately. Goods would be ordered from suppliers and paid for promptly, so creating a good credit rating. After a few months’ operation, massive orders would be placed on credit with the suppliers. The goods would be quickly sold, the Richardsons would pocket the money, and the company would seemingly evaporate into thin air.
By the age of 30, the Richardsons were millionaires. Charlie, who married a local girl called Margaret with whom he had five children, lived in a large house in Camberwell. He had a smart office in Mayfair’s Park Lane from which he ran a company with interests i
n mining. But his real powerbase lay south of the river, in the offices of Peckford Scrap Metal, of New Church Road, Camberwell. It was here that people whom the brothers believed had crossed them were brought in for ‘questioning’.
The Richardsons’ activities were supported by a team of brutal enforcers who ensured that those tempted to complain would think again. The brothers also had a number of bent coppers in their pocket who would immediately alert them if anyone went to the police to ‘grass them up’. Charles was once arrested for receiving stolen goods but police had to drop the charge for lack of witnesses. They kept a careful watch on the gang’s activities, however, and in 1965 they got an insight into the full horrors of their methods for keeping order and repaying old scores. In July of that year, one of the gang’s victims walked into a South London police station and related a horrific story of how he had been tortured by the Richardsons.
The sadistic punishments at these kangaroo courts were equally meted out by Charlie and Eddie. Sick with fear, the victims would be hauled in by gang enforcers and tried before Eddie and the others in a mock court. Then the punishments were ordered – anything from beatings to more fearsome forms of torture. Men were whipped, burned with cigarettes, had their teeth pulled out with pliers, were nailed to the floor, had their toes removed by bolt cutters, and leaped in agony from the effects of electric shocks. Afterwards, if the victims were too badly injured, they would be taken to a struck-off doctor to be patched up.
A favourite tool in these interrogations was a former Army field telephone, a device that had its own electrical generator. The terminals would be attached to the victim’s body and a gang member – usually either ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser or another thug named Roy Hall – would frantically crank the handle. In one session, the electrodes attached to the feet of a victim were failing to deliver the desired level of pain. Charlie Richardson called for some orange squash. He wasn’t thirsty – the drink was poured over the prisoner’s feet to increase the flow of current. The screams of agony began again.
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 12