I tried not to think about my sentence, only the application to appeal. I was told it could take up to a year. And it did. Unfortunately, though, my solicitor Ralph Haeems, for reasons known only to himself, failed to provide Jonathan Goldberg with the necessary paperwork, which put the barrister at a distinct disadvantage.
The following August 1998 we did win the application to appeal against conviction and sentence, but what hopes I had were dashed, three months later when Lord Justice Pill and two other judges turned down my appeal against conviction. I was bitterly disappointed, naturally, given that I believed I shouldn’t have been found guilty in the first place. But I was given leave to appeal against my sentence and I clung to that hope over Christmas, pending the hearing early in the New Year.
When I was transferred back to Belmarsh in the last week of January for the hearing in front of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham, and Mr Justices Kennedy and Jackson, I thought it was simply to save me being driven from Worcestershire, should the hearing go into a second day. But it was more sinister than that. The prison intelligence system, it seemed, had heard of a plot to ambush the van taking me to London and either organize my escape, or, believe it or not, harm me. I was baffled then and I’m baffled now. Anyone who knows me will laugh at the thought of me even considering going on the run. And as for anyone going to such lengths to harm me, who on earth would they be? And, more to the point, what motive would they have? Wasn’t twelve years behind bars in my seventies harm enough? It seemed all too ridiculous for words, but Les Martin had heard of the supposed plot and alerted Jonathan Goldberg, who was interested enough to contact the Governor at Long Lartin. My transfer to Belmarsh, the Governor said, had nothing to do with my appeal hearing; it was for ‘security intelligence reasons’. No one was saying what that meant, but maybe all the talk about ambushing the van might not be as ridiculous as I thought.
Thankfully, it all came to nothing, but I was grateful to Les and Mr Goldberg for making inquiries because you never know; there are a lot of idiots out there. Can you imagine the headline: PLOT TO SPRING CHARLIE KRAY? I had enough to think about without all that rubbish.
I must say that, out of all the people angry at the way I’d been set up and sentenced so severely, Les Martin was the one who seemed to be taking it particularly badly. I heard that he’d sworn to do all he could to clear my name, or at least make prison life better for me, and he was true to his word. I’m sure it was as a result of his terrier-like persistence that Mr Goldberg wrote to the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, in February 1999 about my Category A status. In his letter, while we were awaiting the Appeal Court judges’ findings, he said he was ‘very concerned’ that I had been held as a top-security Category A prisoner since my arrest, in July 1996. It was hard, he said, to see anything in my previous record, or in the circumstances of the current case, that justified such treatment and he was asking for a review of my status ‘because there is a fear that the system may have gone wrong’. He said that I was seventy-two, becoming frail, and had admitted to him that I was taking life on Category A very hard. He was certainly right about that!
Mr Goldberg’s letter said that an ‘impressive body’ of character evidence from eighteen witnesses – unchallenged by Crown or judge – had spoken of my ‘non-violent temperament, acts of kindness and decency and impecuniosity’ over many years. I had to look up impecuniosity, and discovered it was educated people’s way of saying broke! Mr Goldberg was right about that, too!
Mr Goldberg also stressed that I was very different from the notorious twins, but was, perhaps, being ‘tarred with the same brush’. And just in case Mr Straw didn’t get that last point, he enclosed a character reference from a Long Lartin prison officer, Mr A. Jenkins, who had known me since I arrived on his wing in July the previous year. Mr Jenkins’s note, which I very much appreciated him writing, said:
Although I am not his personal officer, I have day to day contact with him [Kray] when on duty. Throughout his time at Long Lartin, he has been very polite and had adhered to wing regimes and expectations. He works in the Time Shop and regularly attends, appearing quite keen to do so. He is approachable to staff, had caused no problems to Discipline and has not been placed on report whilst here. I have always found Kray to be cheerful and polite, he does what is asked of him and is never disrespectful to staff.
I was delighted when I eventually saw what Mr Jenkins had written. If I ever got out, it would be ideal for a job application!
I was right not to set my hopes high on the appeal, because, three weeks after the hearing, I was told my sentence was being upheld, and I would have to serve six years before being considered for parole. No surprise there, then. And no surprise, either, that my Cat A status was not high on the Home Office agenda; it was close on a month before Mr Goldberg got a reply. Each Category A prisoner normally has his case reviewed every year and a review of mine was ‘currently in progress’, the Prison Service’s Director of Security, A. J. Pearson, informed Mr Goldberg on 5 March. The Category A Committee was meeting on 21 April, he said, and Mr Goldberg’s letter would be considered, with other representations by me, or submitted on my behalf.
That did give me a boost, I must admit, but I did wonder why – if there were annual reviews, and I’d always been such a model prisoner – I had not been taken off Cat A after my first year in Long Lartin. And would my review this time around have been quietly kicked into touch had Messrs Goldberg and Jenkins – and dear old Les – not made noises on my behalf?
The Category A Committee did see the sense in downgrading me and, in April that year, I was told I was on the move again. Having been a model prisoner, I was hoping to be moved to a prison further south, but was disappointed: I was being transferred further north, to an unpleasant, very old prison in Durham that I remembered one of the twins’ friends, Chris Lambrianou, referring to as a ‘grim, forbidding fortress’.
With such a long journey ahead of us, and no security of any kind at risk, you would have thought the most sensible, and quickest, mode of transport would have been a police car. No chance! I was handcuffed and ordered into a minibus. I seem to remember it was a six-seater, but, apart from the driver and an accompanying policeman, I was the only passenger, crammed into one of the six single compartments with my knees virtually up to my chin. It was a cold April morning, but someone had felt it necessary for me to make the journey wearing just prison paper overalls. I was freezing for every one of the four hundred or so miles and, not surprisingly, developed a chill.
Now that I’d been downgraded, I could have as many people on my visiting list as I liked, and one of the first I wrote to was Steve Wraith, who lived relatively nearby, in Newcastle. We’d met at Ronnie’s funeral, in March 1995, and had stayed friends. He was well connected in the North-East, and the following July arranged for Tony Lambrianou and me to travel to Newcastle for a charity evening. It was a remarkable occasion: 700 people paid £20 a ticket to meet Tony and me and, what with the auctions and raffles etc., many thousands of pounds were raised for a family friend of Steve’s who had been horribly burnt in a Bonfire Night accident. The evening doubled up as a birthday party for me, so you can imagine I had a great time. Paul Gascoigne’s mum was there and she seemed as pleased to meet me as I was to meet her. She was great fun and we hit it off. Later that night, Steve took Tony and me to a nightclub on Newcastle’s quayside, where everyone, it seemed, wanted our autographs and photos taken with us. We felt like celebrities and, of course, didn’t have to put our hands in our pockets for anything. I didn’t see anything wrong in that – just enjoyed myself among lively, engaging young people who clearly liked me and whatever fame my name gave me.
Of course, I reciprocated Steve’s generosity by inviting him to London and taking him to various East End nightspots and The Guv’ner’s pub, run by twin brothers George and Andrew Wadman, who had become known to Reggie through their boxing achievements. For the next two years, Steve and I went to various charity events, not only in N
ewcastle, where I was always made so welcome, but all over London, and we always enjoyed each other’s company.
If Steve was shocked that I was pale, grey-haired and had lost a lot of weight since he’d last seen me, in court, he didn’t show it; he just started chatting in that lively way of his, as though we’d seen each other only yesterday. Obviously, he wanted to know what I thought about the case, and I told him I was clearly a victim of entrapment, but didn’t know why I’d been set up. He said he had no idea either.
I said the only reason that made sense was that the authorities had been shocked by the hero-worship for Reggie at Ronnie’s funeral, and wanted to quash any chances of his parole by locking me away as an evil drug dealer. Treating me as a hardened criminal by transporting me here in paper overalls seemed to endorse this thinking. Like me, Steve was disgusted by that; for some reason, they were out to humiliate me, he said.
Eventually, we moved on to happier topics, reflecting on the enjoyable times we’d shared together, in London and the North-East, and before he left I asked him if he’d mind letting various people know where I was – particularly Big Albert – and to arrange transport for Diana and Les Martin. Steve was a good bloke; he said he’d deal with it.
I’d never felt one hundred per cent since developing that chill. The pains in my chest had been getting worse and, in the last week of July, I collapsed in the prison’s health centre, barely able to breathe. I was rushed to the city’s Dryburn Hospital, and, a few days later, the Sun ran a story by a reporter named Mike Sullivan, stating ‘Charlie Kray is fighting for his life after suffering a suspected heart attack’. The word ‘suspected’ was crucial: with the hospital unwilling to release patients’ details, Sullivan didn’t know for sure whether I’d had a heart attack or not. The prison source he quoted as saying ‘Charlie hasn’t been well for some time’ was spot on, however – although very understated. I’d been feeling terrible, and my mood wasn’t helped after finally being allowed the updated edition of Me and My Brothers. Reading all I’d said about my Gary’s tragic death, and how the undercover police had used his funeral to get into me, knocked me bandy and there were days when I couldn’t stop crying. My God, how I missed my lovely, lovely boy. It was at distressing times like this that I did wonder, with my appeals now lost, whether life was worth living; whether I should end it all and be with Gary.
It turned out that I hadn’t had a heart attack; but the bit about fighting for my life was true. Apparently, I had pneumonia – brought on, I was in no doubt, by freezing in those paper overalls.
I was moved back to the prison, feeling more like my old self, and felt even better towards the end of August when I was told I was being transferred to Parkhurst, on the Isle of Wight. Although it would mean a longer journey for Big Albert, it would mean I’d be able to see more of Diana, Laurie O’Leary, Joey Pyle, hopefully Freddie Foreman – and, more particularly, Wilf Pine, who had health problems of his own and had been unable to travel to Long Lartin and Frankland. Wilf and his wife, Ros, were now living on the South Coast, at Christchurch, and while it was still a couple of hours – by car and ferry – to the Isle of Wight, the journey was certainly shorter and far more pleasant than it was to that ‘forbidding fortress’ in the far north.
I was so looking forward to seeing Wilf again. We’d been great pals since the summer of 1975, shortly after I’d been reunited with Diana, and were having trouble finding a place to live. Wilf heard about this from Laurie O’Leary and, over afternoon tea at the Dorchester Hotel, in Park Lane, told me that Diana and I were welcome to use his house in Minnis Bay, on the Kent coast: Wilf was now part of a record company managing rock groups and spent most of his time out of the country, and he had a flat in London anyway.
A few friends had clubbed together and given me a couple of grand on my release from prison, but, by the end of that summer, most of it had gone and Diana and I were virtually skint. One day we decided to have a tot up to see just how broke we were, and emptied all the money we could find on the dining table. I counted all the change and notes, then looked at Diana, the love of my life and soulmate, and grinned: ‘Darling. I love you twenty-two quid.’
She gave me a warm smile and hugged me. ‘And I love you, too, Charlie Kray.’
After that, ‘I love you twenty-two quid’ became our secret code – a reminder of when we were so in love that nothing, not even the shortage of cash, could spoil our happiness.
Les Martin wasn’t giving up. Still fuming that my appeal against sentence had been turned down, he wrote to the European Court of Human Rights asking if it was against the law in England to sentence anyone over seventy to twelve years. He also asked for the Court’s view on such a person being released with an electronic tag, given that the UK prison population is the highest in Western Europe. And, just for good measure, Les added a PS to his fax, saying that, as we are all European now, a law should be introduced making entrapment acceptable as a defence in the UK, as it is in Europe.
I had to hand it to Les. After my sentence he’d told anyone who cared to listen that he was going to battle to clear my name, or at least make life easier for me. And he was proving true to his word, bless him.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Shortly after arriving at Parkhurst, my address book was returned to me and I quickly started contacting all the friends I’d neglected during my illness at Frankland. I wrote to Robin to thank him for sending me a copy of Ken Follett’s novel The Key to Rebecca, which had gone to No. 1 in the American bestsellers’ list. Before becoming a multimillionaire novelist, Ken had worked for Robin’s publishing company, Everest Books, and, noticing that Rebecca was dedicated to Robin, I reminded him of the time, in 1975, that Ken and I had a pub lunch to discuss the first edition of Me and My Brothers, which Everest was publishing. I had a few quid in my pocket and, as Ken was such a lovely guy, I happily paid for our lunch, which, in the light of what has happened to each of us, has always struck me as amusing and ironic. Here I am in prison, skint, and Ken’s rolling in it, with homes in London and the Caribbean. But good luck to him: he’s a talented writer and deserves all his success.
I’d only been on the island a few weeks when Big Albert was cleared to visit me – and even though he lived two hundred or so miles away, he was soon visiting me twice a month. He would lock up The Elbow Room in the early hours – sometimes as late as 5 A.M. – grab a few hours’ sleep, then drive to Portsmouth to catch the Isle of Wight ferry. After a light lunch, he would drive to the prison and was never, ever a minute late for the visit. In times of trouble, you find out who your true friends are, and Albert proved himself to be one of the firmest, most loyal I could have wished to have.
Sometimes he came with a mutual friend, Keith Smart, formerly the drummer with the Rockin’ Berries pop group, now their manager, and we had a laugh one day after I found Keith on his own in the visiting hall.
‘Where’s Big Albert?’ I asked, disappointed that the big man wasn’t there.
‘He’s being strip-searched,’ Keith said.
‘WHAT?’ I said, shocked. ‘Why?’
‘To check him out for drugs,’ Keith said.
I couldn’t believe it. Albert being daft enough to try to smuggle drugs in to me was too ridiculous for words.
‘When we were going through security, one of the police dogs was all over him,’ Keith said. ‘So they took him away.’
Albert didn’t emerge until half an hour later. Apparently they had him starkers but for his underpants, seriously believing he was hiding something. Having driven so far, Albert wasn’t too happy about the hassle, and having half an hour lopped off his visiting time, but, typically, he quickly made a joke of it. Next time, he promised, he’d put a Bonio in his pocket to give the dog something to find. We had a chuckle about that, and it gave me something else to think about for a while.
That November, I was thrilled to hear that Wilf and Joey had been given Visiting Orders to see me. If they, too, were shocked that I looked gaunt an
d haggard, and the long, flowing barnet that had always amused people had been cut short, they didn’t show it. They did their best to lift my spirits, but I was so worried that my legs had swollen and I was having even more trouble breathing that I found it hard to respond.
When they asked what was wrong with me, all I could say was: ‘I don’t know. I suppose it must be old age.’ Deep down, though, I feared there was more to it than that and, three months later, I was proved right when my legs ballooned even more and I was transferred to nearby St Mary’s Hospital for tests.
Me and My Brothers Page 40