Jack: ‘What a muppet that guy was. I mean, I couldn’t believe it, walking in, he’s just off his face with it, you know.’
Me: ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What, the big guy?’
Jack: ‘The big guy, yeah.’
Me: ‘Oh, yeah, I know. I’ll have a word with someone today.’
It was another conversation I would regret.
That Friday afternoon, Jack rang again, worried that Ronnie had not phoned at 1 P.M., as promised.
I said on tape, ‘No, no, he said he’s waiting, ‘til he gets that thing and then, when he’s got it in his hand, then he’s going to ring you immediately…’
In the end, the scheduled exchange at The Swallow never happened. But something else did, which would embarrass the police greatly. Michelle Hamdouchi, who claimed to have had sex with Brian at her home after my birthday party, arrived at the hotel around 1 A.M., and enjoyed Brian’s company again. Her evidence at the voire dire had rocked the undercover men’s superiors, who knew nothing of Brian’s indiscretion and felt they should have. Hopefully, when she went into the witness box again, she would expose Brian – and possibly Jack – as liars. At best, this would discredit them as reliable witnesses and get the case against me thrown out. At worst, it might persuade the jury to take what they claimed I said with a pinch of salt, particularly when it was backed up only by their handwritten notes, often written many hours after an alleged conversation had taken place.
When Mr Goldberg got up to outline the defence case, he said he faced a ‘unique difficulty’ as far as his career was concerned. He was defending someone called Kray before a jury under round-the-clock surveillance. He urged the jury not to fall into the trap of thinking the surveillance was because they were trying a top-class gangster, despite the fact that I’d been put on AA security, the highest possible. The guard was merely a part of the hype created in my case.
‘It is nothing other than the fact that his name is Kray,’ were his actual words.
I steeled myself when he began describing the ‘defendant’; he had warned me what he was going to say and I knew I wasn’t going to like it. I sat there, squirming with embarrassment, at the sad picture he started to paint of me.
‘Charlie Kray is nothing more than a pathetic, skint, old fool, who lived on handouts from pals,’ he told the jury, in his opening address. ‘Because of the hand-to-mouth existence he has been forced to lead, he has become an expert at “bull”. He’s been doing it all his life. It’s the only way he’s been able to earn a living, because nobody would give him a job.’
The reason Mr Goldberg took this tack is that, in law, simply offering to supply cocaine – even if you had no intention of doing so – is a criminal offence. And I could be heard on tape doing just that.
The only possible defence – and it was a long shot – was to convince the jury that I was conning the police with a load of bull, in order to get some money out of them. I promised cocaine, but I would have promised scud missiles and gold bars if I thought it would help.
Mr Goldberg told the jury to disregard the tapes on which they had heard me speaking of bribing police, their detection methods and phone taps, my contacts with the Israeli secret service, and even my boasts about having killed a man. It had all been nothing but invention, designed to impress people I thought were wealthy drug dealers.
‘You will hear that the defendant has never been a drugs dealer in any way, shape or form,’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard of a drugs baron who lives like a pauper, cadging fifty pounds here, twenty there? He doesn’t even have a bank account. All you have in the dock is a charming, but gullible, old man, who doesn’t know his limitations, who does not recognize where his charm and bull ends and where the reality of life begins.’
Despite the hurtful personal attack, I thought Mr Goldberg’s address was brilliant. His subsequent attack on the police echoed my own sentiments precisely.
He said, ‘…the undercover officers should be ashamed of themselves for carrying out a deeply offensive operation. With the help of seemingly bottomless expense accounts, they acted as devious agents provocateur, even using Gary’s death to infiltrate into Charlie Kray’s circle of friends. No doubt it was a feather in the caps of several of the officers to have nicked the last of the Kray brothers, but the way they went about it was deplorable.
‘They targeted Charlie Kray…and breached flagrantly their own instructions – not to solicit a person to commit an offence or one of a more serious character than they would otherwise have committed,’ said Mr Goldberg. ‘They lured a foolish and vulnerable old man with no money into a carefully prepared web. They would not leave him alone. They made all the running.’
The tapes the jury had heard of me speaking about tons of cocaine and millions of pounds was nothing more than ‘absurd exaggeration’ as any fool of a detective should have seen, and probably did – but didn’t want to admit it for obvious reasons, said Mr Goldberg. The police must have realized that I was not a big-time criminal with wealth behind me; otherwise why would one of their undercover officers have given me fifty quid for nothing? If you genuinely believe someone is a drug baron, you don’t insult him by giving him that sort of money.
That fifty quid Deano slipped me in Birmingham was the key to the case, Mr Goldberg suggested.
I had mixed emotions when Jack came into court. Part of me was full of loathing for the insidious way he had deceived me; another part pitied him for having to prey on vulnerable old men to earn a living. How, I wondered, did he sleep at night when he spent all day under-cover living a lie?
He stood to my right, behind a screen, hidden from everyone but me. This was ordered by Judge Carroll under a court ruling called Public Interest Immunity, to keep the undercover cop’s identity – and his methods of operation –secret. I did not like it; nor did Mr Goldberg and his team. It gave Jack, Brian and Ken carte blanche to refuse to answer critical cross-examination questions that might jeopardise the Crown’s case.
Jack, the prosecution’s chief witness, wasted no time clutching that cloak of secrecy.
‘When did you meet George?’ asked Mr Goldberg.
‘Can’t answer that,’ replied Jack.
‘You told Kray and Patsy Manning on tape that 9 May at The Wake Green Lodge was the first time you met George. True or false?’
‘Can’t answer that.’
‘You say on tape that you and Deano are firm friends. True or false?’
‘Can’t answer that.’
‘Did Lisa pose as Deano’s girlfriend?’
‘Can’t answer that.’
And so it went on. It was frustrating for Mr Goldberg because he, like me, believed that the first act in this sad scenario was played out before 9 May, and he wanted the jury to know why.
After a while, I couldn’t bring myself to look at Jack as he ducked and dived his way out of Mr Goldberg’s reach. He denied he was party to Patsy’s birthday present and knew nothing of his musical tastes. But he is on tape, drinking Patsy’s health, when Deano made the presentation of the music system.
An important conversation in the prosecution case was the one I had with Jack shortly after midnight in The Elbow Room on 9 May. He denied that his remark about a guy being ‘topped’ in the ‘Dam’ was an attempt to bring drugs into the conversation. He denied he had breached his instructions – not to incite or procure a person to commit an offence. But if he wasn’t trying to do that, why not mention another city and something less gruesome?
Surely he knew that nothing would have come of that drunken nightclub conversation if he had not contacted me the following week and insisted on meeting me in Croydon?
I don’t know who was more pleased to see the back of Jack – me or Mr Goldberg. Hopefully, the jury, who knew nothing of the judge’s PII ruling, would have been concerned at his refusal to answer all those questions. If they weren’t, perhaps big, fat Brian would do the crown case some damage when he squeezed his nineteen stones into the protected area.
Having heard Michelle’s excellent evidence at the voire dire, I could not wait for Mr Goldberg to start his cross-examination of Brian. I felt that whatever he said, or refused to say – there was only one person the jury would believe. And she didn’t have a Geordie accent!
No doubt in an effort to save himself as much as destroy me, Brian quickly accused Michelle of trying to involve him in a mortgage fraud soon after they met in The Elbow Room. But Mr Goldberg dismissed that, telling the court that Brian had not mentioned that point at the pre-trial hearing.
‘It’s a late invention, designed to blacken Miss Ham-douchi’s name, isn’t it?’ he challenged.
Brian said it was not. But it was an early own goal. I could tell it didn’t go down well with the jury.
After that, it was downhill for Brian. He denied this, he denied that and he denied his bit of the other. All not very convincingly.
To the barely disguised delight of the court and the public gallery, Mr Goldberg called Michelle Hamdouchi. I leaned forward in the dock so that I did not miss one word. At that point, I felt my best chance lay with her doing a demolition job on Brian. She did not disappoint.
In a very soft, husky Cheshire accent, Michelle, a respectable mother of three daughters, told the jury she had travelled down from Birmingham ‘to do what was right’. She said Brian kept asking her if I could come up with a cocaine deal. This was helpful to me, because of the entrapment angle, but it was Brian’s sexual indiscretion that would be the most damaging to the prosecution.
Her account of what happened on 11 July left no one in doubt, I’m sure, that Brian and she had full sex, no matter what he claimed. And when she came to the night of The Swallow rendezvous, she had witnesses to back her up.
Brian denied Michelle’s story that he and Jack – who had been drinking in the hotel bar with Spice Girl Victoria Adams – were expecting her to arrive at the hotel. But Jacqui Cave, a bar supervisor at the hotel, told the court that she had overheard them discussing Michelle – and they even passed Brian’s mobile phone to her to give Michelle instructions on how to get to the hotel.
Brian said he was totally surprised when Michelle arrived and ignored her. But Jacqui and two other hotel staff told the jury that the undercover men were not surprised when she turned up and that Brian was, in fact, very chatty with her.
Michelle’s compelling truthfulness spoke for itself when Mr Kelsey-Fry said he would not be enquiring about her love life and had only one question to ask.
‘Would you agree that Brian was a bit of a plonker?’ he asked.
Michelle smiled: ‘Yes.’
Chapter Twenty-four
A plonker, eh?
Well, if fat Brian was a plonker for indulging in two nights of lust with a sexy blonde, what did that make me? I’d put myself on offer, simply for free booze and the cheerful company of guys I assumed liked me, and now I was going to pay for it with my freedom and – who knows? – maybe even my life. If anyone was a plonker, it was me.
In my cell, lying on the metal slab they called a bed, the thought that had been nagging me was there again: Why had I fallen into the trap so easily, willingly almost? Why, oh, why, had I been so trusting, thinking Jack and his mates wanted nothing more from me than my company? As they say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, is there?
When it hit the papers that I’d been pulled in, Reg had been quick off the mark, as usual, slagging me off for getting involved in drugs and jeopardizing his parole chances. He said I should have been on my toes, seen the set-up coming, and, for once, he was right. Bells should have rung when I saw Patsy Manning being handed an expensive birthday present by someone he barely knew. And they should have rung louder when I received a gift, myself, then was given money by a guy I’d only just met.
I could understand Reggie’s anger, but, then, neither he nor Ronnie had ever appreciated how their notoriety had destroyed my life, shattered my confidence and self-esteem, and made me more susceptible than most to flattery and generosity.
The effect of the twins’ murders and general violent lifestyle hit me soon after walking out of Maidstone Prison that January morning in 1975. My aim was to pick up where I left off, get on my feet, financially, and restore my pride – a pride that had been swamped in shame by my unjust conviction.
I didn’t expect it to be easy, but nothing could have prepared me for the wave of distrust, bordering on hatred, my name now inspired. The dramatic headlines and long-running stories of violence and terror that followed each day’s Old Bailey evidence seemed indelibly printed on everyone’s mind. In restaurants and bars, people stared at me warily, their expressions full of curiosity, disgust – even fear. Acquaintances who, before, were only too pleased to offer help were now ‘unavailable’. Business contacts who once saw me as a reliable, skilful operator now didn’t return phone calls. The name Kray, spelt NO in giant capitals, not only in London, but the whole country.
What made my blood boil was not so much that I’d been locked up for something I hadn’t done – although that was bad enough – but that people refused to give me a chance. They assumed that what they had read or heard must be true, and that was that. People who’d never even met me took it for granted that, because I was the Kray twins’ brother, I was a ruthless, nasty piece of work who should be avoided at all costs.
I had to try harder with everything. And I did. I battled to revert to my former self, to recapture some of the good-humoured personality and energy that had endeared me to many people and helped make my businesses successful. I even tried to win over the doubters by telling them precisely how the twins had dragged me into the McVitie murder. But, in the main, people didn’t want to know.
Several friends suggested that the simplest solution was to change my name. But that was something I’d never do. I’ve always been proud of my mother and father, and the name they gave me and my brothers, and I remember being so proud, seeing Kray on my boxing trophies, before and after my Navy life. The mere thought of going through a legal process to rid myself of that name would make me feel quite sick. It would be a betrayal of the dear mum we loved so much. And I couldn’t bear that.
Once I’d decided not to fight a legal crusade to prove my innocence, I did become a happier, more contented, person. It still bothered me, though, that people could hate and distrust me without knowing me and I found myself wanting, needing, to be liked. I didn’t go out of my way to be popular or win approval and I certainly didn’t beg for it, but it became very important that people liked me for myself – cheerful Charlie, a fun-loving party animal, always up for a laugh.
It was this insecurity that made me so vulnerable to Jack and his sneaky mates. They gave me the impression they didn’t give a monkey’s what my name was, or what had, or had not, happened in the past. They liked me for myself, I was sure of that.
Why else would they push the boat out so grandly on Patsy Manning’s birthday at The Wake Green Lodge? Why else would one of them slip me fifty quid in the toilet? It was not as if I was some influential businessman they needed to impress, whose palm they wanted to grease. It was as plain as the nose on your face that I had nothing to offer. Honestly, I felt the same about them as I did with Big Albert. He treated me to this and that all the time, with no strings attached, simply because he liked me and could afford to.
Looking back, of course I’m angry with myself for falling for all the bullshit, for guzzling Jack’s champagne with not a thought that he and his cronies wanted something from me; that there would be a price to pay. But unless you’ve been tainted in the papers and on TV as an evil criminal, who got rid of the body of a man, murdered by one of his
equally evil brothers, it will be difficult to understand.
Someone who did understand was Dave Courtney. When Reggie decided he needed someone on the outside to help pull the funeral arrangements for Ronnie together – particularly the security – he called Dave, not me. Unfortunately, like many others who provided services that day, Dave is still counting the cost. The funeral gained him a lot of kudos for his security company, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the Kray association also led to his wrongful arrest – and put him in Belmarsh on remand with me – for importing drugs illegally. Fortunately, he was acquitted and released from prison early in 1997.
At the time, I was hurt that Reg wanted me to have nothing to do with the funeral. But, watching Dave in action during the build-up, I knew I would not have handled it so well. The discussions with the police over crowd control, for example. The Commissioner of Police, Sir Paul Condon, who came to Bethnal Green himself, clearly had no idea how big the funeral was going to be, but Dave and his security guards had seen the huge numbers wanting to see Ronnie’s body and knew it was going to be colossal – far bigger than even our mother’s funeral in 1982. And that had brought the East End to a standstill.
The three of us met at English’s funeral parlour in Bethnal Green Road and Sir Paul made it clear he wanted his men in sole charge of the operation, from the time the funeral cortege travelled from English’s to when it left St Matthew’s Church for Chingford Cemetery. But Dave was having none of it, and said he had 150 very big, very tough, experienced security guards who would be more of a deterrent to troublemakers than young PCs more used to controlling pop fans.
‘You just get your lot in the street and do the holding hands bit and leave everything else to me,’ he said, in his usual cocky manner.
Sir Paul thought about it then agreed. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But I think your men should wear coloured bibs to distinguish them from mine.’
Me and My Brothers Page 35