Meanwhile, he planned to set up an English branch of Murder Incorporated, a private army of East End villains. He read Mein Kampf. He came to believe he was the reincarnation of Attila the Hun.
Reggie now began to expand the protection business and rackets involving fraudulent companies. Between them, the Krays dominated London’s criminal world.
In March 1962, after the gala première of Sparrers Can’t Sing in Bow Road, the cast and their friends celebrated at the twins’ new club, the Kentucky. their fame and power spread. They moved in on other clubs in Birmingham and Leicester. In 1962, three attempts to kill them were thwarted by their excellent network of informers. By now, they were making about £500,000 a year. they bought their mother a race horse and themselves a restaurant in Kingston – the Cambridge – where Ronnie, insulted one night by an old friend, a boxer called Joe, knifed him in the washroom. Joe’s face needed seventy stitches. Another old friend, Jonathan, also offended Ronnie, and his face was branded. Ronnie’s depressions, drinking, paranoia and sadism increased along with his wealth, notoriety and power. Red-hot pokers were used to brand the Krays’ victims, and claw hammers to smash their hands.
A sensational revelation in the Sunday Mirror on 12 July 1964 of the alleged homosexual relationship between a peer and a well-known gangster resulted in a detailed denial of the allegations by Lord Boothby in The Times, an apology by the Sunday Mirror, the payment of £40,000 in compensation, and the total embarrassment of the press and the police.
This was compounded when, in 1965, the twins – together with Teddy Smith – were arrested and charged with demanding money with menaces from Hew McCowan, owner of the Hideaway club in Soho. Bail was refused. the Firm got to work; the jury failed to agree about their verdict. In the re-trial, McCowan was successfully discredited as a witness and the trial was stopped. (Partly because of the McCowan case, the law was changed so that verdicts in future could be accepted from a majority of the jury.)
The Krays were freed and celebrated by buying the Hideaway, renaming it El Morocco. they celebrated there with the biggest party they had ever given, to which the police and press were also invited. Among the celebrities they claimed as friends were Diana Dors, Barbara Windsor, George Raft, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. Ronnie wrote in his autobiography that the 1960s were ‘the best years of our lives’. He wrote: ‘They called them the Swinging Sixties. the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were rulers of pop music, Carnaby Street ruled the fashion world … And me and my brother ruled London. We were fucking untouchable.’
The West End party of the year was followed by the East End wedding of the year. On 20 April 1965, Reggie, now aged 31, married Frances Shea. they moved in below Ronnie in Cedra Court. two months later, Frances left her husband, going back home to her parents. Six months after her marriage, she was visiting the same Harley Street psychiatrist who had seen Ronnie.
Ronnie himself was now dreaming of becoming an international racketeer, dealing in drugs, guns, forgery and crooked deals. The twins became involved with the Mafia, disposing of some securities stolen in Canada. they acquired a stuttering Jewish banker called Alan Cooper to handle their affairs. He needed their protection, having been threatened by the Richardson gang; the Krays needed him. The middle-class Richardsons had made Ronnie feel threatened: they were getting too big, encroaching on the West End, where the Krays hoped to enter into business in the gambling world with the American Mafia, then attempting to infiltrate and flourish in London.
During Christmas 1965 there was a confrontation between the Richardsons and the Krays at the Astor Club. A Richardson henchman, George Cornell, referred to Ronnie as a ‘fat poof’. An all-out gang war was declared and two attempts were made on the lives of the twins.
Then, early on 8 March 1966, there was a shoot-out at Mr Smith’s club in Catford between the Richardsons and a local gang. The Krays were not involved, but one of their associates, Richard Hart, was killed. One of the Firm later stated: ‘One of ours had gone, so it was up to Ronnie to do one of theirs.’ But of the leading members of the Richardson gang only George Cornell, who had been absent from the Catford shoot-out, was not behind bars. this suited Ronnie, who had a personal insult to avenge.
He asked Jack Dickson, a Scot, to drive him to the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel Road. With him was another Scot, Ian Barrie. Both had guns, Ronnie a 9mm Mauser automatic. There were few people in the pub apart from the barmaid. Cornell, sitting on a bar stool, was drinking a light ale with two friends when Ronnie and Ian Barrie entered. The juke box was playing ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’. Barrie fired two shots into the ceiling. Everyone froze. then, Ronnie drew his gun from a shoulder holster and shot Cornell between the eyes.
No one talked. Ronnie Kray was included at a police identity parade at Commercial Street, but the barmaid failed to recognise the killer in the line-up. She had a poor memory for faces, she explained. Freddie Foreman said in a television interview in 2000 that he had been employed to intimidate witnesses who had seen Ronnie shoot George Cornell.
The Firm’s business suffered as a result of the killing. the twins were now very bad news. They themselves became nervous. they absconded for a time to Morocco, from where they were soon ejected. Reggie now drank more than ever. His wife, Frances, attempted suicide.
In an effort to improve their underworld status, the twins helped Frank Mitchell, the ‘Mad Axeman’, to escape from Dartmoor Prison on 12 December. Just before this, Ronnie went into hiding in a Finchley flat to avoid giving evidence in a forthcoming police corruption trial.
Frank Mitchell, cooped up and out of sight in a flat in Barking Road, became impatient and dangerous, threatening to shoot any policeman he encountered, and the Krays, although he had been provided with a blonde night-club hostess called Lisa to pass the time. Before long he fell in love with her. (Later she would declare: ‘His virility was greater than that of any man I have ever known.’)
On Christmas Eve, Mitchell disappeared. One of his keepers later said that Mitchell was shot in a Thames van occupied by three men and that his body was dismembered and disposed of. the murder has never been solved, and for many years Mitchell was still officially on the run from Dartmoor.
Freddie Foreman claimed in 2000 that he helped to dispose of the body of Frank Mitchell, dumping it in the North Sea – as he did with the body of Tommy ‘Ginger’ Marks, a used-car dealer, whose body disappeared after he was shot in Stepney in 1965. Foreman also said he disposed of the body of Jack “The Hat’ McVitie in 1967.
There were other disappearances. One was Ronnie’s driver, Frost; another was Teddy Smith. There was also a death in the family. Frances Kray, aged twenty-three, took an overdose on 7 June 1967, the day after Reggie bought them both tickets for a second honeymoon on Ibiza. Her funeral at Chingford was a lavish one. She was buried in her wedding dress. A prison associate of Reggie would one day be told by Reggie (according to him) that Ronnie had somehow contrived the death of Frances, and then a few days later told Reggie what he had done.
Reggie went to pieces, drank more than ever, and was full of hate. He began to seek revenge on those who had betrayed him. Drunk on gin, he shot at a man whom he thought had maligned his dead wife. All the shots missed, except for one that struck the victim’s leg. ‘Drunken slag!’ said Ronnie later. ‘Risking our necks like that! You risk everything shooting one of our friends, you drunken pig … You couldn’t kill a man if you tried. You’re too soft. When I did my one, I made a job of it.’ To prove he was as tough as Ronnie, Reggie shot another man who owed the Firm money, again through the leg. He knifed a third in the face.
The Firm’s business had now expanded into fruit machines, drugs and pornography. Assassination plots now occupied Ronnie’s mind: those of President Kaunda, the President of Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, and of Colin Jordan, leader of the far-right Nationalist Socialists. He also had a death-list of the Firm’s enemies. He got the idea that murder would unite the Firm’s members, test their
loyalties and make them more of a brotherhood.
He decided to try out his idea on a drunken, loud-mouthed suspect associate called Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, who habitually wore a hat to hide his baldness. Ronnie had given him a gun and £100 to rub out a former associate, Leslie Payne, for which McVitie would get £400. But Payne was on his guard and remained alive. Ronnie failed to get his money back, so Reggie went to collect it. But McVitie told him a sob story and Reggie gave him £50 instead. Ronnie went wild, abusing Reggie and demanding payment. McVitie, feeling aggrieved and frightened by the twins’ blowing hot and cold, got drunk, and armed with a sawn-off shotgun went looking for them in the Regency club, saying he was going to get them.
Such defiance was unendurable. A few nights later, in November 1967, Reggie, drunk himself, entered the Regency looking for McVitie, intending at last to emulate Ronnie’s murder of Cornell. McVitie wasn’t there. Meanwhile, Ronnie was making other arrangements. He took over a basement flat in Stoke Newington, belonging to a woman called Carol, and, when Reggie arrived, he sent their cousin, a former merchant seaman called Ronnie Hart, and two half-Greek brothers called Lambrianou, who had yet to be blooded, to find McVitie and invite him to a party at Carol’s place. two boys were with Ronnie. they danced together as Ronnie and Reggie waited, along with a man called Ronnie Bender.
Just before midnight, the drunkenly bold McVitie barged in, looking for a party. ‘Where’s all the birds and booze?’ he cried. Reggie, behind the door, pointed a gun at McVitie’s head and fired. the gun jammed.
There was a furious struggle. Ronnie’s boys fled. McVitie got half out of a window – in doing so, his hat fell off. He was hauled back by the legs. Ronnie seized him from behind, pinioning his arms. Reggie now had a carving knife. ‘Kill him, Reg!’ screamed Ronnie. ‘Do him! Don’t stop now!’ ‘Why are you doing this, Reg?’ cried McVitie.
He was stabbed in the face, the stomach and chest, and finally impaled through the throat on the floor – by Reggie, according to Ronnie Hart, who was later counter-accused of this crime by Reggie. But the twins’ honour had been satisfied.
McVitie’s body was never found. Rumour said it had been buried in concrete, consumed by pigs, cremated in a furnace, or concealed in a coffin by a fearful undertaker and cremated. the twins went off on a week’s holiday at an expensive hotel in Suffolk.
Years later, in June 1991, Tony Lambrianou told The News of the World:
Jack is buried in Gravesend. In a grave under the coffin of a person buried shortly after … It was a bad night when he was killed. I’ll never forget the way his guts and liver hung out of his stomach.’ Tony Lambrianou said that Reggie told him to invite Jack to a party, to which he was driven by Tony, his brother, Chris, and two other brothers called Mills. ‘Jack loved a party … He was a cocky villain, who often took pot-shots at people he didn’t like, and he certainly knifed his fair share of enemies … I was the first one through the door, with Jack following me. All of a sudden two gay boys, friends of Ronnie, started whacking The Hat. A bloke called Ronnie Hart, a second cousin of the Krays, then passed Reggie his gun. The Hat was pushed into an arm-lock and Reggie put the gun to the back of his head. the Hat said: ‘What’s the matter? What have I done?’ I saw Reggie pull the trigger, but the gun jammed. Reggie clicked the trigger a few more times. the Hat made a dash for the window and punched it, breaking the pane of glass … Reggie thrust a twelve-inch long carving-knife into his belly. twice more he stabbed him, twisting the blade in and out of his body. Reggie then plunged the knife into his neck … leaving a great gaping wound. It was over in seconds. Reggie turned to me and said: ‘Get rid of it!’
Ronnie Bender assisted Tony Lambrianou, and they wrapped McVitie’s body in a bedspread. ‘We took Jack’s hat too,’ said Bender. McVitie’s body was placed on the back seat of his own Zodiac. ‘The smell was disgusting,’ said Lambrianou. ‘I wanted to be sick.’ They drove off southwards, until the petrol gauge showed zero, when they dumped the car on the other side of the Thames, at Rotherhithe, near a church; here, McVitie’s body was picked up by Chris Lambrianou and Ronnie Bender, who’d followed in another car. The knife and gun were thrown into the river, as were the keys to McVitie’s car. His body is said to have been dismembered and burnt before being buried in a sack.
A month earlier, Scotland Yard had set up a special team led by Detective Superintendent Leonard (Nipper) Read to investigate the Krays and find some charges against them that would stick. Leslie Payne, McVitie’s intended victim, was routinely questioned about his former business associates and decided to talk. He was secretly interrogated for three weeks and his final statement ran to over 200 pages. Other statements were acquired, but many people would not speak until the Krays were safely inside. there was still no corroborative proof against them. Meanwhile, the twins were planning their retirement. they knew about Read’s investigation, and considered killing him. Ronnie’s mind was still on murder.
To test the Firm’s Jewish banker, Alan Cooper, Ronnie suggested he should kill a minor villain whose death would score off one gang while putting another in his debt. Cooper agreed, even though it meant killing the man when he was appearing as a witness at the Old Bailey. Cooper produced an unusual murder weapon – an attaché case that would jab a cyanide-filled hypodermic needle into the man’s leg – and arranged for a tall, bespectacled young man called Paul Elvey to do the job. He failed to do so, because, he said, the victim never appeared at the Old Bailey. Another weapon was provided by Cooper: a cross-bow. Again Elvey’s mission failed.
Meanwhile, Ronnie flew to New York with Cooper, but for some reason failed to make contact with the Mafia. Perhaps his reputation put them off. On his return, to impress the Mafia that he was the king of criminal London, he took on a contract to eliminate a Las Vegas gambler staying at the London Hilton, who proved, however, to be very wary and elusive. An easier target then presented itself: a Maltese night-club owner, George Caruana, whom Ronnie planned to blow up in his car, a red Mini. He asked for Cooper’s assistance, and Cooper again brought in Paul Elvey, sending him by plane to Glasgow to fetch four sticks of dynamite. As he boarded the plane on his way back to London, however, Elvey was arrested. the attaché case and cross-bow were found in his house. Elvey confessed, implicating Cooper.
Cooper’s story was almost incredible. He told Nipper Read that he was an undercover agent, working largely on his own and that he had been working for the Yard and the American Treasury Department for two years, trying to compromise the Krays. The weapons he supplied them, he said, were faulty (for instance, the gun that had jammed when used against McVitie), and Elvey could be relied on to bungle everything. It had been a most dangerous game, and was very hard to believe.
But now Nipper Read had three attempted murders, arranged by Cooper, to pin on the Krays, as well as Payne’s statement. At dawn on 9 May 1968, the police raided Violet Kray’s new council flat in Braithwaite House, Shoreditch. Reggie was in bed with a girl from Walthamstow; Ronnie with a fair-haired boy. they had spent the night until 4.0 am at the Old Horn pub in Bethnal Green and at the Astor Club, Berkeley Square.
With the Krays behind bars, people were now persuaded by the police to talk, including the barmaid from the Blind Beggar. Twenty-eight criminals were promised freedom from prosecution if they cooperated with the police. Ronnie Hart and Jack Dickson were among those who turned Queen’s evidence.
The Krays were charged with the Cornell and McVitie murders. Others of the Firm, like Charlie Kray and Bender and the Lambrianou brothers, were charged with being accessories.
The trial, before Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, lasted thirty-nine days, beginning in January 1969 and ending on 8 March. Ronnie Kray gave evidence, arrogantly denying everything, claiming it was all a police plot. He shouted at the prosecutor: ‘You’re a fat slob!’ He told the judge: ‘You’re biased too!’
Reggie Kray’s defence could have been that he was dominated by his brother Ronnie. But the twins, pleading not guilty,
were tried and sentenced together to life imprisonment, the judge recommending that this should not be less than thirty years. They were thirty-five years old.
The Lambrianou brothers were also given life sentences, with a recommended incarceration of fifteen years. Ronnie Bender was sentenced to twenty years.
The Krays were later found not guilty of the murder of Frank Mitchell. Other charges remained on police files.
For a time, the twins were reunited, in 1972, in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. But in 1979 Ronnie Kray was once again declared to be a paranoid schizophrenic and moved to Broadmoor Hospital in Crowthorne. He was also a heavy smoker and a diabetic. In 1981, Reggie Kray was transferred to Long Lartin Prison in Leicestershire. For ‘humanitarian reasons’ he was occasionally allowed to visit his twin in Broadmoor. They lunched together, exchanged news and views and talked about old times.
In March 1995, Ronnie Kray died in Broadmoor of a massive heart attack; he was sixty-one. the twins’ older brother, Charlie, who had been imprisoned for twelve years for smuggling cocaine into the country, died of a stroke in prison in April 2000; he was seventy-three. Reggie was released from prison to attend Charlie’s funeral service in Chingford. As with Ronnie’s funeral, huge crowds, cherishing the Krays’ legend, lined the streets and mobbed the church. The Daily Mail described Reggie as ‘a wizened little old man, with grey hair and a shaky demeanour’. He had become a born-again Christian and was now terminally ill with cancer of the bladder and secondary tumours.
Because of his illness, he was freed on compassionate grounds from Wayland Prison in Norfolk by the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, on 26 August 2000. Reggie Kray died in a Norwich hotel on 1 October, three weeks short of his sixty-seventh birthday. His second wife, Roberta, whom he had married in prison, was with him, as were some of his surviving henchmen.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 54