Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror

by Lambrianou, Tony

  People were so short then that very few ever had a holiday, but if they could afford it they’d go picking hops in the fields of Kent, a very East End thing to do. Our family never had a holiday together, and the first one I ever had I went on my own. I was taken to Eastbourne at the age of eleven by a family called the Hopkinsons, who lived above us in Belford House. There was Flo and Dan and their children, Danny, Terry, Rita, Maureen and Jean. We went away in his lorry, all eight of us, and slept in hammocks inside it. I had no new clothes to take with me. I was wearing Leon’s, washed out. My mother scraped together £2 for me to spend, which for a kid then was quite a lot of money. The Hopkinsons were always considered to be ‘better-class’ East Enders, with that little bit more money to spend on enjoying themselves. They moved out several years later and they’re all in America to this day, doing well.

  It was around this time that the police called again on the Lambrianou family. One Sunday night when Chris was fifteen, he went out and broke into a newspaper factory in Hoxton.

  I was at home with my mother, Leon and my two younger brothers when there was a knock on the door at eight o’clock. Two plain-clothes police officers came into the house with Chris and a package of paper. They had arrested him for breaking into the factory and stealing the newspaper.

  I remember my mother in tears, saying, ‘Why are you taking him over a package of waste paper?’

  He ended up before the London Sessions and was sentenced to three years at Borstal in Hollesley Bay in Suffolk. He escaped from there a couple of times: once he was caught in Ipswich, the second time in Woodbridge. While he was there, he represented the Borstal at boxing. He fought at the US Air Force base in Woodbridge and he was the middleweight champion of the county throughout those three years. It didn’t take him long to build up a reputation as a ‘daddy’ – the top man. And on his monthly visits home he was inviting characters that he’d met there, all the East End wide boys, who were a big influence on me. His attitude was becoming more aggressive – an ‘I’m gonna beat ’em up’ type of thing. That was Chris all over.

  I was fourteen when he was released. And as soon as he came out, they stuck him in the Army. They put him in the Pioneer Corps, which meant that he was considered to be an uneducated no-good, only fit for dogsbody jobs. It was the dustbin of the British Army, for all the dregs they didn’t really want there. He joined on a Thursday, and on the Saturday night there was a knock at the door. It was Chris, in his uniform. He sat at home with a hammer, breaking his toes, to get him out of the Army – to my mother’s horror. She had to see things at that time which weren’t very nice. The Military Police came and carted Chris off. Next thing we knew, he was in Shepton Mallet army prison, which is where he met the Kray twins for the first time. He got a dishonourable discharge from the Army.

  Shortly after this Chris, Leon and I went to see a film called The Blackboard Jungle; the title music was ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley. That was the start of rock’n’roll in England. Nobody had heard of it until they saw The Blackboard Jungle. It was all about kids in America with flick knives, drapes and tight trousers, and I’d never seen anything like it. Suddenly, teddy boys were on the streets and everybody, everywhere, was saying what a bad influence they were. I’ll never forget the day Chris came home with the drape, the velvet collar and the drainpipe trousers. He paid fifteen quid for the suit, which he bought from Woods the Tailor in the East End. The twins used to use him. They bought all their suits from his shop in Kingsland Road.

  My father didn’t like the image, and he went absolutely potty. He got this suit, he cut it up and he got the big stick out…. The way we were brought up, in typical East End – and Greek – tradition, the old man was head of the household and nobody, including my mother, ever questioned his authority or decisions. Even when we were grown up and married, he still kept the big stick by the dinner table.

  But the teddy boy influence had taken hold of us. Chris used to have rock’n’roll music blaring out round the house. We had a radiogram by this time. A van used to come round and you could buy singles off the van for 2s 6d each.

  By now I was at Queensbridge Road Secondary Modern School, where we all went except for Chris. One day, a schoolmate called Peter Robertson turned up to class wearing the drape and drainpipes. A teacher whom we called Clinker told him to go home and change. His answer was ‘Fuck off’. It was unheard of to say that to a teacher, but it was very much our underlying attitude. School was just a big joke. To me it was a waste of time: there was no future in it. Half the pupils didn’t even know the alphabet. The teachers felt that if they managed to teach you the ‘Three Rs’, if you could read and write when you left, then they’d done their job, but they were up against it.

  We used to play pitch and toss, throwing money up against a wall. The person who threw the nearest coin to the wall would pick up the kitty. We got involved in petty crimes like stealing milk, or bullying kids in the school playground if we thought they had pocket money. We all gambled.

  On Friday afternoons, they used to beat us up. There were three PT teachers: Mr Donnelly, Mr Leary and Mr Eldridge. They’d all have tracksuit bottoms on, and they’d walk round the classrooms, pick you up by the lapels and lay into you. None of us ever complained. We accepted that as part of our life. If I’d gone home and complained, I would have got a right-hander off my father.

  They were schools for crime and I think the teachers accepted that that was how it was going to be. Some ‘better-class’ schools would take their pupils on organised trips to the museums and that. Not us. We were taken out on a sightseeing visit to Wormwood Scrubs, about twenty-nine of us. We walked around the prison, and then the teacher lined us all up and said: ‘This is where you lot are going to wind up.’ We thought it was a big laugh, but it wasn’t so far off the truth. Many of the pupils went on to become well-known villains, Hoxton boys like Tony ‘Tubbsy’ Turner and George Murray, who ended up controlling the local lorry hi-jackings.

  I did do something useful during my schooldays, though. At the age of fourteen, I represented the school as a boxer. My father’s best mate, Eddie Phillips, had fought for the British heavyweight title between 1938 and 1944. He was known as the Aldgate Tiger, and he’d fought Joe Louis and Tommy Farr. He worked at Spitalfields Market on the fruit and veg, and he saw the potential of Leon, especially, as a fighter. Chris had done his bit, too, representing his approved school and borstal.

  Another man my Dad knew was Prince Monolulu, the black racing tipster from Charlotte Street. He used to wear an Indian outfit and a headdress with big plumes, and they used to go to the races together. He would say to me and my brothers: ‘You could be boxers or you could be villains.’ And he’d tell my Dad, ‘Your boys are fighters, one way or another.’ I don’t think my Dad understood it.

  Chrissy and Leon had been recognised as fighting boys among the schools in the area where we lived. They’d been in plenty of street fights. Leon was a good scrapper, and even as a young fellow Chris had a reputation for being a bit of a lunatic. It was, ‘Leave it out a bit, don’t get involved with him.’

  He wasn’t a bloke you could push. He would turn. He had a very, very explosive temper and didn’t know what fear was. He was dangerous. When Chris had a fight, it didn’t stop at a fight. He was never one just to use his fists. He’d want to pick up a tool as well. He’d think nothing of picking up a knife or anything else that came to hand. There was always something different about Chris and his fighting.

  As a kid, Jimmy was the only one of us with curly hair. It was jet black. He was a good-looking boy, and even as a young adolescent he always wore a suit. He was a quiet fella, but if you upset him, he wouldn’t forget it. He was an out-and-out street fighter who believed in settling his arguments with his fists. He was always very proud of the family name.

  Nicky, the baby of the family, had a wild streak as far back as I can remember. He was reckless and he had a temper second to none. If he got something in his mind, he
would be right and that was the end of it. He was influenced by the East End and by the brothers and the people around us, so I suppose he was destined to go the same way. He was to become the best money-getter of the lot of us.

  It was obvious to us at an early age that you didn’t survive by being quiet. You survived by your fists and your boot. On Saturday nights, we used to watch the brawls at closing time. People used to come out of the bars fighting fit and the women were worse than the men – two women fighting, usually about their kids, is something to see. And if you didn’t have a family of brothers with you, you were nothing. Brothers were your strength. Apart from a rare few one-offs, all the major villains of our generation were from families of brothers. There were the Richardsons and the Frasers from south London, the Regans from west London, the Foremans from Battersea, the Nashes from the Angel, us from Haggerston and the Krays from Bethnal Green and Bow.

  Most of them were boxers. They came from that type of background, all the time fighting each other in schools and at national level. Football was another important part of life in the East End. Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris and Alan Harris of Chelsea, and Bertie Murray of Chelsea and Brighton & Hove Albion came from the same school as me. Career opportunities at that time were very limited. The markets were a family thing, a closed shop. Tailoring and French polishing were very big, and if you could get into printing it was a bonus. Other than going into these trades, your only hope of rising above the poor conditions of the East End was to be a boxer, a footballer, a showbiz celebrity, a thief or a villain.

  At thirteen, I had become very well aware of the Kray twins when the story of their fight with the dockers spread round the East End like wildfire. They had walked into a pub, the two of them, shut the doors, taken on a whole bunch of dockers and walked out. I was very impressed. If you were a docker you were a tough man, the bee’s knees. But even the dockers stood back and said, ‘These two are something else.’ They were fearless, the twins. That was the difference about them, and that was important in their careers.

  From my early teenage years I was increasingly drawn towards the same criminal path, like Chris before me and Jimmy and Nicky after me. But Leon, following his first early brush with the authorities, was two-thirds straight throughout his teens. He would later clean up his life completely, to become a good and honest man. In the period after his borstal, Chris was known to be up-and-coming and good at what he did. By the time he was eighteen he tended not to get involved in the things that we younger brothers were up to. He was a loner, Chris. There were several little gangs around Haggerston, and Chris moved about from one to the other. He spent a lot of his time involved in dubious dealings in the West End, and he really started to take off. The rest of us, too, were becoming more and more notorious in the local area, especially in Hoxton. Where previously other kids’ fathers had smacked us round the earhole, now they wouldn’t. But we weren’t all bad. If we ever saw any women struggling along the streets with heavy bags, we’d carry their shopping. I went into the twins’ house many times, helping their mother Violet, without ever realising they lived there.

  I left school early, at fourteen, and took a job at the Sleepy Valley Bedding Company in Hackney Road, Bethnal Green. I got it through a youth employment agency, where I didn’t have much choice. I used to knock holes with a machine into the edges of the beds and I was paid 2s an hour. I gave my mother £2 10s a week. One day I came out of work and saw Frankie Shea at the junction of Hackney Road and Weymouth Terrace, which is where his family came from. His sister Frances came along. She would have been about twelve or thirteen, very quiet and very beautiful with big eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen the girl who would grow up to marry Reggie Kray. The bedding company was one of the longest jobs I would ever hold, and I worked there for nine months. And from that period onwards I started getting into villainy. Properly.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GIRLS, GANGS AND GUNS

  About this time Leon, Jimmy and I began to hang around the local dancehalls, places like Barry’s in Mare Street and the Royal in Tottenham, as well as various arcades and cafés. A lot of similarly minded local boys were around: the Venables brothers from Hoxton; Terry Smith, who was a gunsmith; Johnny Dallison, later to be one of the Wembley bank robbers grassed up by Bertie Smalls; Roy Ewes, who went on to do the Baker Street vaults in the seventies; and the Nash brothers, Jimmy, Johnny, Georgie, Billy and Ray, who would each wind up convicted of a murder.

  We teamed up with Terry and Jimmy Venables and started causing the occasional fight in Barry’s. We’d go down there to take on the local tearaways because it was something to prove. I think we were on an ego trip: other gangs from different areas would be challenged, and we would always do what we wanted. We didn’t fight clean: Chains, knives, anything that came our way we used, which is a trademark of the East End.

  Eventually we discovered that there was money to be made from the fighting. Barry himself was a very nice bloke, a gay; he had a couple of bouncers there keeping a bit of order, but they couldn’t cope with us lot. He asked us to stop the fighting, and in the end he propositioned us: he gave us £10 a week to keep the peace, but it didn’t go very far among five of us.

  After a couple of weeks of this, more trouble started. We put it to Barry: ‘If you gave the boys £5 each, this wouldn’t happen.’

  Then we started to spread to the Royal. The manager said, ‘We’re going to bar you.’

  ‘You’ll get more trouble than it’s worth,’ I said.

  One of the bouncers, Jim, went and had a chat with the manager, who then said: ‘As long as there’s no trouble caused, you can come in here for nothing.’ It reached the point where he was giving us £50 a week.

  This was our first little taste of protection, which was to expand greatly at a later stage. I was also going into a bit of thieving. By the time I was seventeen, my Dad saw the path I was taking. He never managed to speak English well, but he was no one’s fool. If he saw me in what he thought was bad company, he’d say, ‘What do you bring a person like that round the house for?’ Leon was courting a girl called June Veal, his future wife, and my Dad would say, ‘Look, Leon’s found a girl and quietened down, what about you?’ I did meet a girl, although I wasn’t about to quieten down for anybody.

  I first saw Pat Strack in 1959 with three of her mates in Barry’s dancehall. She was a local girl from Bollo Road, Bow – very pretty, one of the best-looking girls in the East End. She was then sixteen, about five feet two, with blue eyes and naturally fair hair coloured auburn. What attracted me to her was her short, urchin haircut; she looked like a little doll. Pat wore the rock’n’roll era clothes, the billowing skirts and all that. She was an apprentice hairdresser at the time, working in Kilburn in north London, but she left after a couple of years.

  I walked her home that night, down Mare Street and along into Bollo Road. I took her to the door and said, ‘I’d like to see you again.’ She said yes, and we arranged a date for the next night.

  I was seventeen, out to impress but I was skint – I had only a pound on me. I took her to the pictures, and from that day onwards she only ever had one night away from me while I was in freedom. That was the night she did her Aunt Gladys’ hair.

  Her mother, Maisie, came from a well-known family in Bethnal Green and her father, Charlie, who was nicknamed Flip, was a cab driver and an ex-docker. He knew everyone, including the Kray twins. I think he objected to me pretty strongly in the beginning, but in later years we were to become close. Pat had a younger sister, Anne, and a brother, John, who was the youngest of the family.

  I remember the first time I brought Pat home. Everybody took to her, my Mum and Dad, and my Leon who was there with June. They virtually moved Pat in with us. She loved her parents, but she was with us all the time now. My parents idolised her: she was the daughter they never had, and that’s the way they treated her. Our courting days were nothing spectacular, but all the same she quickly became one of us – a Lambrianou in all
but name.

  And then I got nicked. I was making quite a lot of money at the time by breaking into shops and wealthy houses, and in August 1959 I went off to the Midlands with a Shoreditch bloke called Phil Keeling and a couple of other local lads. Keeling had a nice car and he always had a few quid around him, and that was how I judged his success. He was a lot older than me, which was an advantage because if anything came to court my representative could always play on ‘the influence of the older man’ to wiggle me out of it.

  We travelled with him doing jobs in Coventry, Sutton Coldfield, Nuneaton, Hinckley and Leicester, staying in bed and breakfasts or sleeping in the car. In the end, the police caught up with us in Coventry, where we had stayed the night with a friend of ours. I woke up to hear the door coming in. The police surrounded the house and took us to Nuneaton, where we were held for two days. Phil had apparently left a thumbprint at the scene of one of the crimes, and I’d left prints of a thumb and index finger.