Me and My Brothers

by Kray, Charlie

  One day the twins and I were staring at the security cage and saw three guys taunting a tall, spindly, ginger-haired bloke who looked like an office worker. The three bullies just wanted to have a go at someone and we were not going to stand for it. We shouted out to them that they were nothing but cowards, that they were brave only because there were three of them. The men took one look at us and decided to leave it out. As they walked away, the weak-looking ‘office worker’ looked up and nodded his thanks. We discovered later his name was Paddy Sullivan and he was a major in the IRA. He was waiting to come up for trial.

  Six months later I got a message from Freddie Foreman. His son, Gregory, had been called in by the headmaster at his public school and asked to give his father the message: ‘Paddy Sullivan sends his regards and best wishes to Charlie.’ Apparently the headmaster knew Paddy well and had been to visit him in Wormwood Scrubs.

  Paddy was obviously one of those people with a long memory.

  When I got sentenced it seemed like the end of the world. But I never thought of trying to escape. When the Mitchell case was thrown out, it helped me come to terms with the ten years. It was still terrible being punished so severely for something I didn’t do, but at least it was not a life sentence. I figured I would be out in seven years if I kept my nose clean: short of being beaten up and forced to retaliate I reckoned I could keep myself under control.

  But if I had been sentenced to life on the murder charge I do think I would have changed – and tried to escape at every opportunity. I would probably have been killed, but what would it have mattered? The twins know that they did certain things and they do not cry about their sentences, but I would not have been able to accept it like that, because I was innocent. 1 dread to think what sort of twisted, hateful character I would have turned into had that Mitchell rubbish been believed.

  As it was, I did my best to accept that what was done was done, and nothing was going to change it. It would have been easy to give in to my hate and bitterness, to lose control and smash things up in frustration, but I knew that could destroy me. So, as the days and weeks and, eventually, the months wore on, I gritted my teeth and battled to keep myself under control.

  It was not easy though. And when I was finally moved from Brixton to Chelmsford in Essex thirteen months later, I still had not come to terms with the fact that I was caged like an animal for something I did not do.

  My world at Chelmsford consisted of just ten other A-Category prisoners in a small, maximum-security block with cameras watching every move. We were treated like children. Normal prisoners walked freely to their work but we were led everywhere and led back; we would have to wait for prison officers to fill in the pass book and to log the time. When we left for lunch we had to wait for someone to escort us fifty yards or so. It was frustrating beyond belief.

  There were thirty cells for just ten prisoners, and my fellow inmates got so bored that they would move from one cell to another for something to do. Because we were in such a confined space we were allowed certain freedoms to save us going out of our minds. If you wanted to work, you did; if you didn’t, no one made you. I felt I needed to keep myself busy; one week I would go into the workshop and saw iron for traffic triangles; the next I would wash the rubber floors. I even got into cooking: the kitchens would send the food to us and we would try to make it appetizing.

  But it was the outside exercise I lived for. We played volley-ball – every day for two years – and football. The exercise period was one hour, and cameras in the four corners of the playing field watched us all the time while a helicopter hovered overhead. Such expensive security was senseless – one needed to be Superman to clear the wire and barbed wire on the high walls behind the playing Held. The prison officers were hand-picked and as good as gold and I’d ask them about the vast amount of money being squandered unnecessarily. They would merely shrug and say, ‘Don’t ask us, Charlie, we only work here.’

  On Mondays we were taken into the main prison – an elaborate process in which we had to pass between electric doors and bullet-proof glass windows. But it was worth it. The library was there and we were allowed to spend fifteen minutes picking books. It was like a holiday.

  In the evenings, once or twice a week, a woman would come in to teach us handicrafts. She was a lovely lady, in her fifties, and we looked forward to her visits. You have to give her credit: she was very brave, although I think she knew she was perfectly safe. We all thought so much of her we would have died rather than let anything happen to her.

  I told her once that what she was doing was worthwhile, and that I admired her. I promised myself I’d take her some flowers when I got out but, sadly, it was one of the things I never got round to.

  Wally Probyn was a clever bloke. He was the man who arranged John McVicar’s escape from Durham Prison by knocking a hole in a shower and covering it with papier mâché until it was time to go. Wally was due to escape, too, but something happened and only McVicar got away. During the riots at Durham in 1964 some prisoners locked themselves in an office and read reports written on them for the parole board. The men could not believe the terrible, untrue things the prison staff had written: it seemed incredible that a prison officer had the power to poison a prisoner’s record with the stroke of a pen if he didn’t like him.

  Suddenly it became all-important to me to know what my report said and Wally knew an officer who promised to find out. Nothing could have prepared me for the shock of hearing what that report, which my immediate future depended on, said. The exact words were: ‘Charles Kray. This is not his natural attitude. It is all a pretence. This cannot be his normal behaviour, because he is too nice. He has caused no problems since he has been in this prison, but we know this is a big act.’

  I was shell-shocked. Just because I said ‘Hello, please and thank you’ and didn’t go around hitting people, they thought something was wrong. I tried to treat the report with the contempt it deserved, but it was impossible: the injustice of it all burned into me deeply and there was nothing I could do about it.

  As I entered my second year at Chelmsford, my bitterness at being robbed of important years of my life began to fade and I softened a little. I formed close bonds with some people I might not have wanted to know outside. Somehow, when people are thrown together in jail, one doesn’t think of their crimes – you just get on with the business of living.

  Someone I did get close to was John Duddy, a small, grey-haired man sentenced to life, with Harry Roberts, for the Shepherds Bush murder of three policemen in August 1966. It choked me one day when he told me he’d decided to tell his wife they were finished. I felt he should not do it, because they had been married many years and were still in love. But he said he knew he was never going to get out of prison and he didn’t want her to waste her life. She was too good for him, he said.

  His wife didn’t want to know about a divorce and she told him she would still come to see him whether he liked it or not. John was pleased, of course, but insisted she should visit less frequently, to give herself a rest. He was a very unselfish man and over the next year we got very close.

  One Sunday evening about 7 P.M. I was called in to see the Prison Officer and told I was being moved to another prison early the next morning. At about 8 P.M. John Duddy came up to see me. He was pleased for my sake that I was going, but sorry to see me go because ‘things have been good since you’ve been here’. Close to tears, he said he wasn’t going to wait until 9 P.M. to ‘bang up’, he was going in early. But he asked me to knock on his door in the morning to say goodbye. It was all rather emotional; you do get close to people in a short time in prison.

  At 6 A.M. the following morning I was handcuffed and taken to a security van by six Prison Officers. My report, I was reliably informed, read: ‘We have come to the conclusion that this is not an act with Charles Kray. It is his normal behaviour.’

  It had taken someone two years to work that out and now I was being transferred to Albany on the Isle of Wigh
t, a couple of hundred yards from Parkhurst, where the twins were held.

  While I was in Albany I heard that John Duddy had died of cancer.

  We travelled through London on the journey to the Isle of Wight and my stomach knotted when we hit the East End. It was a weird feeling, looking through the darkened windows at all the old, familiar places: it hurt, but at the same time it was lovely. So Poplar and Bow and Mile End and Whitechapel were still there! The joke in prison is: ‘Don’t worry – over the wall, the world’s still there.’ And now I could see it for myself. The driver pulled up at some lights and I told my six guards that I’d lived only a minute away. I’d got quite close to them in two years and one of them said, ‘If we had our way, Charlie, we’d nip you down there for a quick cuppa.’ But, of course, the security was so tight that it was out of the question. The van was in radio contact with police stations at different points en route, as if someone expected a helicopter to drop out of the sky and pluck me to freedom. We moved away from the lights and suddenly we were in Whitechapel Road; there, staring me in the face, was my old factory with the sign, Berman and Kray, still there. What I would have given to walk along that street just then, even as a roadsweeper! But soon the van was picking up speed towards the city, pulling me away from the warmth of my nostalgia.

  I got my chance to breathe fresh air when we stopped at a police station for my guards to use the toilet. I stayed in the yard, basking in the exquisite feeling of the hot summer sun and cool breeze on my face and in my hair. I stared up at the sky, marvelling at its blueness. I’d seen the sky in prison, of course, but somehow it was different looking at it on the outside. It was only a tiny police station yard and I was in handcuffs but for those few minutes I felt I was in heaven. I could have stayed there all day, but soon we were on the move again, passing through Central London and South London suburbs towards the A3. All the way through Surrey and Hampshire I talked little and just stared out of the window, drinking in the beauty of the countryside, thinking, as I had a thousand times in prison, that you don’t know how much you’ll miss something until it’s taken away from you.

  Then we were on the ferry and I was transfixed by a kaleidoscope of colour that took my breath away. In prison I’d been surrounded by dowdy greys and blues month in, month out, but now in front of me were greens and reds and yellows, all bright despite the darkened windows of the van. It was warm and sunny and there was a holiday atmosphere. I took in the men’s suits and shirts and watched them drinking beer out of cans; I watched women talking casually and children running around playing. Everyone looked happy. I’d seen smiles on the faces of people in prison but, like the sky, it was different. I wanted to get out of the van, close to the children’s laughter, but it was forbidden, so I stayed there looking out through the dark green glass at the unfamiliar scenes, feeling as though I was from another planet.

  When we got to Albany one of the six guards unloaded my box of gear and we waited in a little room for the prison staff to take me to my cell. When the time came one of them said, ‘Well, that’s it, Charlie. You’re here. They’ll be giving you something to eat in a minute.’ And then they all shook my hand, promising to give my regards to all the people who had become my friends in Chelmsford. The Albany staff looked shocked: a Kray brother in the nick, shaking hands and exchanging good-natured pleasantries! They could not be blamed for being surprised. The publicity about the family would have made anyone expect the worst. In my case, they were to discover that the image bore little resemblance to reality.

  Within a few minutes my cell was full of people wanting to say hello. I was pleased and was polite, but after a short time I wanted them to go: I had been in a world of just nine other inmates for two years and the talk and noise sort of did my brain in. I wanted to be on my own, to shut my eyes and think about the countryside and the ferry and pretend I was going on holiday. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, they drifted back to their own cells. But one bloke, a Scotsman, hung on, and when the others had gone and we were alone he started telling me how he had stabbed and killed someone. We were similar, he said, we were both doing ten years.

  We were about as similar as Jekyll and Hyde!

  He loved talking about his violence, thinking I would enjoy it, but it sickened me; violence always has. He was one of those idiots who have wanted to be in prison all their life. He loved it. But I was doing ten years for nothing, and all I could think about was getting out. Finally I could stand him no more and told him to go.

  Alone that night, I thought back over my day. It had been an enjoyable trip: it had done me good, put me in a better frame of mind. I lay on my bed and brought the colours of those holidaymakers into focus, filling my head with the laughing faces of those happy children.

  Oh, yes, over the wall the world does exist, I thought, my eyes full. I’d seen it.

  For a while, Ronnie had been alone in Parkhurst, on the Isle of Wight. But Reggie was moved from Long Lartin Jail, in Worcestershire, to calm him down.

  Ronnie has been taking four different tablets every day since his breakdown in the fifties. He understands that they keep his paranoia and uncontrollable temper at bay and insists he has the prescribed dosage four times a day. One day in Parkhurst a new officer in charge of the high-security wing chose not to understand Ronnie’s problem.

  When Ronnie went into the office and asked for one of his tablets, the new man was difficult. He was on his own, in the middle of a shift change, he said, and Ronnie’s request would have to wait.

  Ronnie, who knew his body’s danger signals well, told him the matter couldn’t wait: he was due a tablet now and he had to have it.

  The officer checked his records. Yes, he agreed, Ronnie was right: four tablets a day and one was due now.

  If he had simply taken out the appropriate pill and handed it to Ronnie, all would have been well.

  As it was, the officer seemed anxious to prove a point. ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you the tablet,’ he said.

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Ronnie.

  ‘Because I don’t know which one you’re supposed to have right now.’

  ‘It must say which one in my records,’ said Ronnie.

  The officer shook his head. ‘It doesn’t.’

  ‘Don’t give me that.’

  ‘You’ll have to wait until my relief comes back.’

  ‘I’m telling you, I need to take that tablet. I know I have to have it.’

  ‘You’ll have to wait till the other officer comes back,’ said the new man. And he added cockily, ‘And I wouldn’t bank on him giving you a tablet anyway.’

  Whether it was the bloke’s arrogant attitude or the urgent need for that tranquillizing tablet I don’t know, but Ronnie snapped, as anyone who understood him would have expected. He felled the unsuspecting officer with a right hook, then picked him up and vented his anger and frustration in a severe beating.

  Ronnie’s polite request for a tablet landed him in the chokey block for fifty-six days – with a diet of bread and water on and off for fifteen days.

  When he came back to the maximum-security wing, he was very disturbed. Bobby Welch, one of the Great Train Robbers, was standing at the top of the stairs and said something. Ronnie told him to get out of the way, then picked up a chair and proceeded to smash everything he could see: lights, tables, other chairs, and the glass on the inside of the barred windows. When his frenzied moment of madness was over he turned to watching prison officers and said, ‘You’d better take me to the chokey block again.’

  I heard the story from Welch when he was transferred from the security wing at Albany. He said it was awful; he couldn’t believe what they had done to Ronnie.

  Obviously someone did. For Reggie was quickly brought down from Long Lartin and asked to tell Ronnie he would be allowed out of the block the next day if he promised to behave himself. It did the trick. Ronnie got it all off his chest and said he’d had enough of the screws treating him badly. He knew he needed tablets to keep him calm.


  Perhaps next time they would believe him, he said.

  I had come to terms with being robbed of my freedom. But I was becoming more and more bitter about being on the A-Book and all the stringent security that went with it. To be regarded as a constant threat, someone to be watched twenty-four hours a day, is bad enough when you’ve done something to deserve it. When you have done nothing and are non-violent and easy-going it is terrible, and impossible to accept. What made it worse for me was that all the prison officers could not understand why I was on it in the first place. My case kept coming up, of course, but I was always turned down. Someone somewhere very high up had clearly made a decision about me. My name was Kray and that was that.

  The attitude of Home Office officials did not help my mental state either. After seven months at Albany I had served a total of three and a half years, qualifying for parole. I was taken upstairs to a cell where a young man in his middle-to-late twenties was sitting at a desk, ready to interview me. There was a young woman there, too.

  I sat down and he said, ‘Kray?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘Ten years,’ he said. ‘Well, you aren’t going to get parole, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not,’ I said, failing to keep the hard-edged sarcastic tone out of my voice. ‘And who are you to judge that?’

  He said nothing, just looked at me.

  ‘Why are you wasting my time bringing me up here for an interview if the decision’s already been made?’ I said. ‘You give all the sex cases, all the perverts who are a real danger, parole. But normal people don’t get it.’ Before he could say anything, I went on. ‘Anyway, if the decision has been made in my case, I don’t see any point in talking to you.’ And I got up and walked out.

  I was seething. All right, it was my first interview for parole and I didn’t expect to get it. But why build me up then put the knife in before I’d been asked one question?