I spent five months on remand in Leicester and Winson Green prisons. It was my first experience of prison. Winson Green was a dingy, filthy place in the worst part of Birmingham. There were three of us in a cell, locked up twenty-three hours a day. I felt a long way from home and my visits were a bit restricted. Pat, my mother and my father came to see me when they could, every Saturday and sometimes during the week. I would look at people doing fourteen years and think to myself: ‘If that was me, I’d hang myself.’ Little did I know what the future had in store for me.
I appeared at Warwick Quarter Sessions after doing a deal with the authorities. I was told that if I pleaded guilty, and saved them the cost of a trial, I would be put on probation. There were so many charges against me that they decided to make do with a nominal two. Pat and my father were waiting for me when I walked out in January 1960 with a two-year probation order.
In April I turned eighteen; by now we had reached the stage where people knew better than to rub us up the wrong way. As we got older, the tally man got bashed up, and there were incidents when the neighbours came to us for help. One day, my old man said to us: ‘Joe Sylvester in Orme House wants to see you.’ Joe was a well-liked man in Haggerston, and he asked us to sort out some people who had caused problems for his daughter. It was the first time we had ever been called on like this, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
Jimmy and I and the Venables brothers drove over to the address Joe gave us in Lewisham, knocked on the door and duly bashed up these blokes. Joe was so impressed he gave us £75 and told us that some of his friends might be able to use us. Another neighbour came home one day and found out his wife was having an affair with someone. He offered us £100 to beat the geezer up – which, again, we did. From smacking us round the earhole to paying us to bash someone up was obviously one big step. We were starting to be treated really differently: ‘All right, Tony? How are the boys?’ People knew we were getting useful. It didn’t take long for these things to get around.
My mates and I were ready for anybody and anything. We had built up an arsenal, with weaponry like you’ve never seen. We had shotguns galore, three rifles and half a dozen hand guns, a Thompson sub-machine-gun, a couple of grenades and numerous knives and swords. A lot of these we were able to get through our connections with Terry Smith, the gunsmith, who would steal them out of the factory bit by bit, the barrel one day, the stock the next. We also knew a trading place for guns, old wartime relics, called Port Road. A lot of dealers kept souvenir weaponry, which could easily be converted back to what it was.
The machine-gun had been taken off a plane used during the First World War and renovated privately by Terry Smith. We decided to test it out in the Venables’ back garden in Hoxton. Terry Venables let the chickens out: one burst and they were all dead. It was always kept nice and clean and oiled, the machinegun, but it was never used against people. Nor were the grenades. We exploded one in a field in Epping Forest and it blew a tree right out of the ground. The other one we threw in the sea, just to see what would happen. About thirty fish flew up, dead.
The nucleus of our gang was Terry and Jimmy Venables, David Sadler, Terry Smith, my Jimmy and myself. By now we had started to go to town on the dancehalls, the arcades and the cafés, and we were always tooled up when we were around them, in case we came up against another gang. The swords were stored in the boot of the car, and we carried a gun and daggers and knives. People didn’t mess about with us, but at the same time they never took a lot of notice of the weapons. On a few occasions we fired shots into the air in certain places, but the reaction would be: ‘No one hurt, let’s keep this quiet.’
We were taking weekly payments from the dancehalls and we started making money from a string of amusement arcades run by a man called George Fairey and his partner Paddy. They had four businesses in Hackney and Dalston Junction. We’d go in and, all of a sudden, bang! A machine would get done or one of his customers would get knocked out. I’d say, ‘You’d better keep this lot happy.’ And eventually he started paying up. We used to get a lot of money out of him.
Round the corner from his arcade in Dalston Junction was a club called Chez Don, which was doing well. I walked in there one night with a friend called Timmy Reynolds and it went off – an East End expression for trouble starting. We said to the manager, ‘If you don’t let us in here again, there’s going to be more.’ In the end, they were paying us £50 a week to stay away from the place.
Fifty yards away was Lou’s Café, which was owned by a Jewish couple. We used to get a few quid off Mr Lou: he didn’t want his business turned over. One Saturday afternoon I was in there with Terry Smith, Jimmy and Terry Venables and Davy Sadler. Five Irishmen who were doing roadworks outside came in for a meal. Somebody handed me a packet of three. I took out one of the condoms and chucked it into the chip pan. It expanded more than a bit, but because it was that pale, fatty colour Mrs Lou didn’t notice it. She served it up on one of the Irishmen’s plates.
He said, ‘What’s this?’, and all of a sudden he grabbed her by the throat and tried to throttle her, at which point her husband dived underneath the counter to hide. The place was in uproar. We just broke up.
When we went back after that, Mrs Lou wouldn’t serve us although old Lou himself would. He used to call her the dragon – ‘Don’t come in when the dragon’s here.’ I think he was scared to refuse us – he was very wary of us. He had another café in Shoreditch. One day about a year later I walked into this café and there she was, Mrs Lou. She yelled, ‘Get out, you animal! Get out!’, and chased me down the road.
I was doing well for an eighteen-year-old. I was earning about £130–140 a week from all these rackets and the thieving. The other boys viewed it all as a bit of a joke. I didn’t. I saw the opportunities, the openings and the advantages. My mother, naturally, wanted us all to settle down, but I was drifting in and out of odd jobs, doing a lot of driving with the aim of nicking a load when the right one came along. I was always one to keep my eyes open for an easy chance. Looking back, it was pretty reckless.
I remember working for a firm called Blue Star Sheets Ltd. It was run by a little Jewish man, Manny. It was all very Jewish in the East End in those days, although the Maltese were coming in and opening lower-calibre cafés and bars. I took the van out, loaded with sheets, and drove round the corner, where a couple of my mates were waiting. We unloaded the van and its contents. I went back to Manny and said, ‘I think someone’s stolen the load out of the van.’ I got the sack, obviously, and a couple of days later we shared out the load.
My brother Nicky had become heavily involved by this time, and Nicky was good. You could always rely on him to get a few quid. He would think nothing of jumping a lorry, pushing the driver out and driving off. Jimmy, however, had drifted back out to the fringes of it all – and, thank God, he was to go on and do greater things in life; Leon, too, was more or less straight. They still joined us on the occasional job, but it was getting rarer and rarer. So it was Chris, Nicky and I who were coming through as not the best boys in the area.
It was also during this period that I started having a bet. Bookmakers were illegal at the time, but street-corner bookies would operate out of a house. There were always two runners, whose job it was to watch for the police. When the shout went up, the bookie would lock his door. The street-corner bookie was very much part of the atmosphere of the old East End. I remember one Grand National day when I was eleven or twelve. All the old girls were putting on bets of 6d and a shilling, but this bookie, Harry, did a runner with the takings. Some of the Hoxton mob got him in Southend, brought him back and gave him to the old girls. They whacked the life out of him.
From having bets myself, I started working for one of these bookies in Haggerston. He paid me good money to run for him, and I soon found out that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the police were aware of what was going on and were being paid back-handers. I used to see the local copper go in there and come out smiling.
> Throughout this period, people kept saying, ‘You should be with the twins.’ The Krays’ name was very big then; everybody knew of and respected them. They were very, very powerful men, at the top of the tree. They were known to be ruthless: they didn’t threaten – they did it. They weren’t men who messed about. No one in the local criminal circles ever referred to them by name. It was always ‘they’ or ‘the other people’ or sometimes ‘the firm’; an expression which at the time specifically referred to the twins’ gang but has since passed into everyday language to describe any band of villains.
The minute Reggie and Ronnie walked into a nightclub, you knew instantly. You didn’t even have to see them. The atmosphere would change. People would stop talking; some would leave. Their presence alone gave out certain messages: be careful what you’re saying; don’t barge in; never touch them; always be polite. They were treated with the utmost respect. I never saw anybody pat them on the back or use bad language around them. If someone was out of turn they wouldn’t stand for it, and everybody knew that. As fighting men they were unchallengeable, and it was no shame to say that if either of them hit you on the chin, you went down on the floor. And they were always on the look-out for up-and-coming material. Of course, we were nowhere near their league in those days and all that was still something in the future. I’d only just met them.
I was standing on a street corner just outside the Cornwallis pub in Bethnal Green Road when an American car drove by. Reggie Kray and Frankie Shea were in it. Frankie shouted out at me, ‘Okay, Tone?’, and I yelled back, ‘Nice car, Frank.’
He shouted, ‘It’s Reggie’s.’ Then he said something about me to Reggie.
Three weeks later I was in Bethnal Green Road again, in Pellicci’s Café, which was one of the places that the twins used to hold their afternoon meets. I’d seen them there on and off since I was a boy, two very smart young men who always had a few people around them. Neville, the guv’nor of Pellicci’s to this day, often jokes about the number of people Ronnie knocked through the window. On this particular day I was sitting in there with a mate of mine, Timmy Reynolds, when Reggie and Ronnie walked in with several characters I would later come to know as Big Pat Connolly, Teddy Smith, Tommy Cowley, Sammy Lederman and Harry Jew Boy.
Reggie came over to me and said, ‘You’re Tony, a friend of Frankies. He’s going to be my brother-in-law.’ He added, ‘Don’t forget us, come and see us … and I’ll do this, Neville.’ With that, he paid our bill.
They were good-looking men, obviously very fit, and well known for being clean-living. That day I sensed an aura about them, a certain danger. You instinctively knew they were something different, and you knew they were men you didn’t take liberties with.
Chris and I often sat and talked about them. We began to see more of them in Bethnal Green over the next year, and we got to know them well enough to have occasional dealings with them. If we went to the twins, we could always get a little bit of help. They had an open door, and all they asked in return was a bit of trust and a bit of respect. They worked on a basis of: ‘Look, if we can do a good turn, come and see us, and if you can ever do one in return, fair enough.’
They had so many car dealers in their pocket it was untrue, and they could use their influence to get you a motor. You paid a deposit on it and signed up legally. Then it was yours, and you would just forget about the following payments. Only when the case went through the civil courts could they order a snatch-back on it, so you would keep it for two, three years until the finance company repossessed it. The twins would send you to certain car dealers who would sign you up straightaway; you couldn’t do that without their help. Sometimes you didn’t even need a deposit.
But our connections with the twins at this time were very slight. Chris was off doing his own thing, and I was doing mine. He was always a bit aloof, Chris, and never went out of his way to get on with us like brothers normally would. For example, if we were all playing cards he had to win. He always wanted to show that he was the tough one among us, and Leon and I were a challenge to him. I had a fight with him one day and he threw a knife at me. It went in my leg, so I let one go at him with a shotgun. Luckily for him, I missed. It took a bleeding great lump out of the wall.
Chris was capable of doing anything. He was a man of very changeable moods, and if someone upset him he didn’t think, he acted. He wasn’t a man you could turn your back on, and he would hold a grudge badly. He was big, about six feet two, well-built and very smart – a Savile Row man. He had to have the best things in life, and he had to have them right away. If he wanted something, he just went and got it. While I was growing up, I always looked up to him, because he was the livewire of the family.
Despite the fact that we usually worked independently, in 1961 Chris and I joined forces in a disastrous escapade. He wanted to do a post office. He’d got hold of some explosives and he was talking about, blowing a safe. We decided to go to the post office in Stoke Newington. I went round to the alley at the back to keep a look-out while Chris broke in. He got inside and rummaged around, but we must have made a noise and disturbed somebody, because the next thing was that the police arrived.
They decided to let me go and to charge Chris with breaking into the post office and having explosives in his possession. They just wanted Chris: they saw something in him, and the Old Street and Dalston police had it in for him. My mother was convinced that Chris was being picked on. He was the one my parents doted on: for them, Chris could do no wrong. I saw the other side of him. He was sentenced to two years in a corrective training centre in Verne prison, Portland, a small island joined to the Dorset coast by a causeway.
Chris was at that time courting a girl called Carol. He’d met her about six months before he went away. She stayed on at Queensbridge Road with my Mum and Dad, Jimmy, Nicky, Pat and me. Leon had moved out to a flat in Blythe Street, Bethnal Green, after marrying June that year in Bethnal Green church. Carol visited Chris regularly and so did Pat and I, in a car which Carol bought me, a Mark I Zodiac. Carol went on to marry Chris when he came out, two years later.
Meanwhile, I’d started making money in the West End for the first time, along with my Jimmy, the Venables brothers – Terry and Tiny – and Terry Smith. We knew a Greek who had a basement snooker place in Soho, in a narrow alley running between Wardour Street and Dean Street. He was known as Nick The Greek, and he was the only man I ever met who could bend a penny with his fingers. His brother was on the door of the Society Club in Jermyn Street. The girls from the clip joints around Frith Street, Greek Street and Dean Street used to go in and out of there and we would get talking and have a laugh with them. I remember three in particular, called Carol, Dawn and Kim, and it was through meeting them that we got the openings.
The set-up in every clip joint is the same. The customer, or john, picks the ‘hostess’ he wants to sit with. The man buys her drinks all night, and the promise is that he gets sex afterwards – he makes a private arrangement with the hostess. The whole operation is geared to making as much money as possible in a very short time. The drink is usually watered-down scotch – the john could be paying more than £500 for a bottle’s worth – and each drink is served with a stick. The girl returns the sticks at the end of the night and cashes them in for money. Some of the men would spend a fortune on alcohol and cash gifts to the girls.
Afterwards the girl would tell the punter she would meet him down the road in ten minutes. She didn’t, of course. Our job was to have a car standing by to get her away from the club. For this, we received 50 per cent of what she had earned. I can only once remember a girl actually going with a bloke, when she happened to meet a millionaire. I took them to the Russell Hotel in Russell Square. But the biggest coup I ever knew was when a girl called June clipped a wealthy old farmer for about twenty grand. He’d come to London for the Agricultural Show at Olympia and he was so delighted to be promised a night in a hotel with a pretty girl that he lavished her with cash and champagne, for which s
he later picked up the rewards. Needless to say, she did a runner before the farmer even saw a hotel. They did need protection, the girls. If any of the men got troublesome, we’d give them a kicking. We were always four-or five-handed.
We began to build up a lot of contacts in the West End, and we became known in the clubs round there. I started to see quite a bit of the twins, especially Reggie Kray, who was always around. He was very active at that time, very smart, a man about town. The twins were running Esmerelda’s Barn, a gambling nightspot in Wilton Place, Knightsbridge, and they were into all the best places. I used to bump into them in the Regency in Stoke Newington, in the City Club in the Angel and generally around the West End in the Pigalle, the Bagatelle, Churchills, the Stork and the Society Club. I joined their company on these occasions, and I came to know virtually everybody around them.
In October 1961 I got nicked again, and again it was with Phil Keeling. He was a gelly man – a gelignite expert – and he drove me to the West Country, where we headed for two small Somerset towns called Ilminster and Chard. Phil was into blowing safes, and he had heard of one in the Ilminster Co-op department store. It was like a post-box: people used to post their money into it.
As we were driving along, Keeling pulled out a packet of three. I thought, ‘What does he want them for?’ That’s when I learned that French letters and balloons are ideal for keeping gelignite in. When you do a safe you have to put the explosive to the weakest point, which is usually the lock. You have to get a thin layer of gelly round the door, you have to goo it up into the keyhole itself and you’ve got to get as much as you can into the safe. When you’re laying the gelly, you pierce the end of the rubber and squeeze it out in a thin line like you do with pastry or icing. Then you can cover it with Plasticine. You set it off through a detonator, a battery with a wire on it. You cross the circuit, and that’s what causes the explosion. But you’ve got to know what you’re doing.
Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror Page 5