It was decided that Mitchell would be smuggled out of the country. More money was provided and Donaghue was told to take him to a remote part of Kent, on the first leg of his journey. On Friday night, 23 December, the two men left the Barking flat together. Frank Mitchell was never seen again.
As that 1967 spring turned into summer, tension in the East End mounted. The police were no nearer to bringing Cornell’s killer to court and now they had another East End mystery on their hands. However, a far more significant event had been taking place at the Old Bailey which was to have a serious knock-on effect for the twins, their Firm and me. A South London gang, led by one Charles Richardson, had received massive sentences in what had become known as The Torture Trial. The victory had given police chiefs at Scotland Yard a tremendous boost in their war against London’s gangland. The spotlight, we quickly discovered, switched from south of the Thames to the East End, and the twins’ manor in particular.
I didn’t see a lot of the twins but whenever we did meet I got the feeling that they were under scrutiny – in their favourite pubs there always seemed to be somebody in a remote corner, watching points, taking notes.
Ronnie and Reggie had followed the sensational month-long Torture Trial and appreciated the dangers ahead. But they had such a total lack of fear that they took the increasing pressure lightly, particularly Ronnie. In the Grave Maurice pub in Whitechapel Road, for example, he would wave a mocking greeting to anyone he detected was a copper, and invite him over for a drink. Once he walked down Vallance Road to find detectives watching the house from a car. He apologized for keeping them waiting, then went in and told Mum to make some tea. He took it out to them in four of her best china cups and told the surprised policemen to make sure they returned them when they had finished.
Always the more dominant, more fearless, more reckless twin, Ronnie was convinced that he was above the law and that the Cornell business proved it. It was over a year since the killing. If the Old Bill were going to nick him, he said, they would have done it by now. The fact that nothing had happened proved they couldn’t touch him.
I told him to cool it and warned that both he and Reggie were heading for serious trouble. But as usual Ronnie didn’t listen. With this air of invincibility he started embarking on wild, extravagant plans to make vast fortunes with Alan Bruce Cooper, the moustachioed, stuttering American who was now permanently on the scene. I didn’t trust the man; he reminded me too much of Leslie Payne, whose elaborate plans also came to nothing. I was to discover that my intuition was right.
In the spring of that eventful 1967 I went to Spain with Dolly and my daughter Nancy on an all-expenses-paid trip organized by an American friend, Joe Kaufman, who had gambling connections and an antique shop in New York. Shortly after our arrival at the Avienda Palace Hotel in Barcelona, Joe, a keen amateur photographer, told me he’d been taking some long-range pictures from his balcony and seen someone else’s telephoto lens focused on him. At the time I was amused: I told Joe he probably wasn’t the only photographer in Barcelona. However, the incident was to have sinister implications.
We all went on to the resort of Sitges, further along the Costa Brava, and who should turn up but A. B. Cooper and his wife. He claimed he was in Spain on business and had decided to drop in and say hello. I presumed that Joe had told him and thought no more about it. But we discovered later that Cooper was, in fact, an informer for the CIA or FBI and had provided the police with a comprehensive diary of the twins’ movements over the previous couple of years. We tumbled him when he tried to trap the twins into parting with some incriminating evidence in a room bugged by police. Cooper’s plan, almost infantile in its conception and execution, began with a spate of phone calls and telegrams to the twins, and culminated with a frantic phone call from a Harley Street nursing home. He was, he claimed, suffering from a duodenal ulcer and wanted the twins to visit him. Precisely why was not clear. The twins were convinced it was a set-up and sent Tommy Cowley instead.
Tommy told me later that he smelled a rat the moment he walked in; Cooper simply did not look like a man with an ulcer. Then, shortly after they began talking, a nurse burst in, the Old Bill written all over her. She handed Cooper a menu and asked him what he wanted for dinner, which Tommy took to be a cue for Cooper to turn up the volume on the mike, probably hidden under the bedclothes.
As soon as the nurse left the room Cooper started talking about the gelignite Paul Elvey had gone to Scotland to get. Tommy looked suitably puzzled and asked why Elvey had gone there to get gelignite.
‘To blow something up, of course,’ said Cooper.
Tommy roared with laughter. ‘You delirious or something?’ he said. ‘We’re supposed to be the guv’nors in London. If you want any gelignite, I can get you some today.’
It was all too ridiculous for words, and shortly afterwards Tommy made his excuses and left, without giving the listening law one shred of information that could have landed the twins in trouble. That was the last they saw of A. B. Cooper – until he turned up at the Old Bailey to testify against them.
A friend of the twins’, Harry Hopwood, called at my flat wanting £2,000. The twins had decided to buy a pub and needed the money. I wasn’t very happy about the hurry-up approach and sent Harry back with a message that I’d see them tomorrow. In those days it was easy to buy a pub and within a matter of weeks The Carpenter’s Arms in Cambridge Heath Road was ours. We suggested Harry’s sister and her husband ran it for us, in return for a weekly wage plus a flat above. The couple had no home of their own at the time and were delighted with the deal. A ‘godsend’ was the word used.
The pub was to become a regular meeting and drinking place for the twins and their Firm. But for a while a different type of customer made a name for himself. He was a tramp who Ronnie befriended after seeing him looking for dog-ends at the front of the house in Vallance Road.
Most of our family smoked, and the old man used to collect all the dog-ends and put them on the pavement, much to the delight of the local tramps who thought all their birthdays had come at once. The hoard was like gold dust, especially Ronnie’s throwaways; he used to take only one or two puffs, leaving virtually a full cigarette. Ronnie, who had no idea the old man looked after the local tramps in this way, came out one morning and was horrified to see a shabby bloke with a beard and unkempt hair rummaging around the dog-ends.
‘Throw them away,’ Ronnie said. He took a packet of cigarettes from a pocket. ‘Have some of these.’
The tramp, a shortish, stocky guy in his mid-forties, could not believe his luck. Later, Ronnie mentioned the incident at home.
‘I’ve always left the dog-ends out there,’ the old man said.
Ronnie shook his head. ‘You can’t expect people to smoke dog-ends, Dad,’ he said, horrified.
After that, Ronnie used to wait until the tramp came along then go out and give him some fags. Over the next few days he got to know him quite well and took him to the public baths in Cheshire Street for a clean-up and shave. The next thing we knew, he had bought his new-found, fresh-smelling friend a new suit, shirt and tie and wheeled him into The Carpenter’s Arms. ‘Let’s give him a few quid,’ he said to Reggie and me. ‘And if he wants a drink, don’t charge him.’
The mounting police interest did not bother Ronnie. And Reggie had a far, far bigger problem on his mind early that summer – Frances. She was becoming more and more depressed and seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She had always been a highly strung woman; Reggie did not know it when he met her but she had had a couple of minor breakdowns in her teens. In the early days the Shea family had accepted Reggie but gradually as he became more and more successful and Frances was taken to West End shows and one champagne party after another, they grew to resent the relationship. In a strange way, they seemed jealous of their own daughter and this, I’m sure, played on her mind.
For several months, just before Christmas and after, she was very depressed. Reggie suggested it might do her go
od to stay with her parents for a while but Frances didn’t seem too keen. A few days later, however, she suddenly disappeared. Reggie was out of his mind with worry. Nothing was heard of her for three or four days, then Reggie got word that she was in hospital. When he discovered that her family had known where she was he hit the roof, unable to understand why no one had bothered to tell him. He rang me at the time in a terrible state. ‘How do you think this makes me feel,’ he said, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘A wife in hospital and the husband doesn’t know!’
I couldn’t say it to Reggie but I wasn’t too surprised at the Shea family’s behaviour. They had never treated Reggie with any respect. Whenever he called round at their house to pick her up – before they were married – the parents never invited him in. They would call down from an upstairs window, ‘She’ll be out in a minute.’ And they would leave him to wait in his car. Sometimes he’d wait an hour. I told him I could not have stood for it, I would have driven off, but Reggie loved Frances enough to put up with anything.
Naturally, he went to see her in hospital and a day or two later she came home. But she did not look well: her eyes were lifeless, her face pale and drawn. All the vitality and effervescence she had displayed on her wedding day two years before had gone, leaving her looking much older than her twenty-three years.
Then she went to stay with her brother, and the next time Reggie saw her she was dead.
It was a Wednesday morning in June. I was at home when the phone rang, and the moment I heard Reggie’s voice I knew something was wrong. He started breaking his heart. For some time I couldn’t make out what he was saying but eventually he got out that Frances had taken an overdose. He had gone round to see her at her brother’s house and when he hadn’t got a reply he had located the brother and they’d found her in bed. Dead. I couldn’t take it in. It didn’t seem possible. Reggie was sobbing on the phone and I told him to go to Vallance Road; I’d see him there. I dropped what I was doing and raced round but Reggie was already there and had told Mum. She was as devastated as we were. Reggie just sat in a chair, staring ahead and repeating, ‘If she’d been with me it wouldn’t have happened…it wouldn’t have happened…’
I told him it was an accident; Frances had surely not meant to kill herself. She was probably feeling neglected and took an overdose to try and get some attention. But Reggie did not even hear me. He just said, ‘Why did she do it? Why?’
Reggie’s heart was broken. He wanted to see Frances’s body after the autopsy at Hackney mortuary, and he asked me to go with him. There is a police station near the mortuary and while we were in a small room waiting to be called two policemen walked in. We couldn’t believe it. Reggie started to choke with anger but I begged him to ignore them: they would probably have excused themselves by saying they were checking that Ronnie wasn’t around. They just stood there, watching us. I felt like saying, ‘Can’t you find a better time?’ but heeded my own advice to Reggie. Having a row in a place like that would have been dreadful; it would have made us lower than them.
Finally, we were called and went into another room where we could look through a window at the body. The two policemen moved so that they could half-see us in a mirror. Reggie and I stood looking at Frances and then Reggie started to cry, and I walked out of the room, leaving him to release the grief and heartbreak he’d been bottling up since that terrible Saturday morning. The policemen were watching him, and as I passed them I felt like lashing out. But I just sat down and ignored them and waited for Reggie, and when he came out, still choked, I just said, ‘Come on, let’s go home.’ The policemen followed us out and were still watching us as we drove away.
It was then that I began to understand my brothers’ rebellious attitude towards the police.
Mum, the old man and I tried to give Reggie support, but more than anything he needed the companionship of his twin, who could understand what he was going through without the need for words. However, the Townsend second trial had still to be heard and Ronnie was holed up in the flat in Kensington. He felt he would make things worse for everyone if he suddenly reappeared.
Reggie wanted Frances to be buried in her wedding dress but the family said no. They blamed him for her death, and their hatred was so deep that they tried to have her maiden name of Shea substituted for her married name on the coffin and memorial stone. But, of course, Reggie resisted that.
The funeral was held at the church where Frances and Reggie bad been married just two years before and it caused a personal problem for Father Hetherington, who would conduct the burial service. He was a very Christian man and couldn’t come to terms with his resentment towards the Shea family for the appalling manner in which they were treating Reggie: it hurt him to feel so badly towards them. Nevertheless, he refused to be hypocritical and insisted that Mr and Mrs Shea did not travel in the first car with Reggie. He also called me into the vestry and made it clear Ronnie must not turn up at the funeral. He urged me to make him promise not to come, even if he felt he had a duty to be present. Ronnie wanted to pay his last respects to his brother’s wife but he thought too much of Father Hetherington and Reggie even to consider breaking his promise.
The police did not know this, of course, and on the day, police cars lined the route to the church and detectives mingled incongruously with mourners. The occasion was bad enough for all who had known and loved Frances. To have her death robbed of the dignity it deserved just made it worse.
Reggie did not speak to the Shea family after Frances was laid to rest. He didn’t want to know them; they blamed him for their daughter’s death and he blamed them; they said he had always been bad for her and he said they caused her mental problems by trying to pull her away from him. It was pure hatred on both sides.
For Dolly and me, our springtime trip to Spain had not changed anything: we continued to drift apart and by August I was going through my own domestic crisis. I adored my kids, of course, and was enjoying watching them grow, but the marriage itself was virtually over. The rot had set in the night I learned about George Ince, and the relationship had never recovered. That summer I was ripe for another affair and, when the chance came I threw myself into it with all the boundless joy of a carefree teenager.
Her name was Diana Ward and she had been hired as a waitress for a casino-nightclub I was opening in Leicester with a partner, Trevor Raynor. The club was due to open officially in the autumn and one afternoon I went to Leicester with Tommy Cowley to see how it was progressing. Within a few minutes Tommy spotted Diana. He was knocked out by her beauty and eagerly pointed her out to me. My mind was more on business, and I told him to keep his eyes off the staff. Secretly, though, I admired Tommy’s taste: Diana was stunning.
Over the next few weeks, I got chatting to her and learned that although she was married it was not a relationship made in heaven. I was not in a position to ask her out, though. In London I was up to my eyes with my other businesses and I was not able to pop up to Leicester as often as I would have liked.
However, I did have to see how the club was coming along, so I set aside Wednesday as my ‘Leicester day’. Diana was on my mind a lot, and as I drove north a warm feeling of pleasure would flow through me at the prospect of seeing her.
What I did not know was that on the eleventh floor of Tintagel House, a towering office block on London’s Embankment, behind a door marked ‘Krayology’, the spider’s web was being spun carefully, hour after hour, day after day. A pile of damning documents was growing steadily – detailed reports and sworn statements on the movements and activities of the Brothers Kray by so-called friends and associates, eager to trade a lifetime of loyalty for the promise of freedom. Suddenly that summer, betrayal was in the air.
Reggie could not cope with the loss of the beautiful woman he had idolized. For weeks after the funeral, he tried to drink himself into oblivion every night to ease the pain. Thanks to the Valium the doctor had prescribed him he found this relatively easy. Mum hated going to pubs every night, but
she came with Reggie and me because we were so worried about him. He didn’t seem to care about anything any more, he just drank and drank. And when he had drunk too much he would drink some more until the effects of too much gin and Valium would explode in his head making him incapable, and we would take him home and put him to bed.
Reggie had always taken immense pride in his appearance, but in his misery even this went out of the window. Once, someone saw him at five in the morning walking along Whitechapel High Street with no jacket and his shirtsleeves rolled up. Two policemen called out, ‘What are you doing?’ But Reggie just glared at them and walked on without saying a word. Evidently his look was enough for them to get the message. In the state he was in God knows what he would have done to them if they’d got busy.
Frances had been his life and now she had gone life would never be the same again. If she had not died so tragically young, if she had been around to give him love and a purpose for living, Reggie’s entire existence would have taken a different direction. As it was, the whole appalling episode crucified him, and took away everything except an overwhelming desire to destroy himself.
The only reason he had for living, it seemed, was to die, to join his beloved Frances. He pumped more gin, more Valium, into his body to take him away from the terrible reality of her death, and inevitably his personality began to change. I watched the transformation hopelessly with a kind of dread. Reggie was disintegrating before my eyes and there was nothing I nor anyone could do. He was on a wild, crazy rollercoaster that was hurling him round and round, faster and faster, and he didn’t care where it took him or where he ended up. More gin. More Valium. As the heat of that summer of 67 cooled and autumn brought an early warning of winter’s chill to the East End streets, the transformation was almost complete and Reggie’s death-wish was about to shatter the barrier that separated him from Ronnie, and change all our lives for ever.
Me and My Brothers Page 13