We were becoming very big indeed in Birmingham and thereabouts, and it seemed we could get away with anything, despite the personal attention we were receiving from the police. We had a special squad of policemen watching us, and we felt their presence. They would openly drink in our company. It was pleasantries all round. They’d say, ‘Good evening, boys, we’re hoping you don’t have a late one tonight.’
And then there was an incident in the Piccadilly Casino in Manchester, the night we bumped into Davy Clare’s girlfriend. I was in this little casino with Chris, Peter Metcalfe and Eric Mason, who’d turned up again. Chris and I were watching the action on the roulette when a man suddenly walked over to where we were standing. Without saying a word he got out these little books, opened them and let us see that they contained photographs of the four of us. He then said, ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ and promptly walked out of the club.
It was like playing a game. The police were letting us know we were not going to get any control of the North or the Midlands. But in a sense they’d missed the boat: we were already established there. And any attempts to undermine our position were quickly dealt with. We were once told that five club owners in Birmingham had got together and decided to impose a blanket ban on us. We immediately sent out a wreath to each of them, with a message saying, ‘Sorry to hear about your recent loss. Our sincere condolences.’ That put an end to any notion of barring us from the clubs, and we found doors open wherever we went. That’s the power of fear. One night, someone threw a bottle in one of the clubs and it hit Chris on the head. The person who chucked it didn’t realise at the time who the bottle struck. He did later. From what I understand, he immediately left Birmingham and went to live in Canada.
Fear is one thing, but continuing to command it is another. You must be known to be capable of carrying out whatever you threaten. We were known – and seen – to be more than capable of it. The customers at a Birmingham casino-diner called the Ambassadors could vouch for that, as well as the six bouncers on the door. At the time, I was using a brand-new American Mustang which I’d acquired through a long firm, while Chris was driving a Ford Galaxy 500. We pulled up in the driveway of the Ambassadors in these cars, Chris and I got out and marched into the building, straight past the bouncers in their dinner suits. We were looking for someone. In front of a whole crowd of people we dragged the man we wanted out of there. No one did a thing. We gave him a right thumping there and then. We’d supplied him with money for gambling, and he’d tried to have us over.
It wasn’t the first time someone had tried this, although it was unusual. For the most part we made a killing from gambling, financing the games and then taking our percentages. One man, however, took a £500 loan from us on the understanding we’d see him three days later in the Albany Hotel in the middle of Birmingham. Up there we always used to have our meets in hotel bars, never pubs. But he didn’t turn up. We then heard that this man, Graham, had won a large amount of money. We always had one of the girls in the casinos straightened out, giving her money to tell us what was going on. He’d obviously done a runner.
Some time later, I booked into the Albany for a short stay. I came out of my room one day and there in the foyer was Graham with a girl. He didn’t see me. I discovered he was in the next room to me, and I immediately informed my brother. Up came Chris. We knocked on the door, the girl opened it and we burst in. Chris ripped the television off the stand it was sitting on and threw it at Graham. Then we gave him a pistol-whipping. We confiscated the money he owed us, which was more or less all he had in cash in the room, and told him to leave Birmingham and never come back. He went abroad.
It wasn’t as though we were picking on an innocent person. People like Graham approached us, they knew we were criminals and they knew the rules. If they broke those rules, they knew what to expect, and they couldn’t go to the law for sympathy. Our attitude was either they paid us or we paid them. Everybody accepted that from the beginning, so nine times out of ten violence was never necessary. But if anybody was stupid enough to try and take a liberty, we would stop it automatically, even if some of what we had to do was unpleasant.
At this stage in our career, as I have mentioned, we didn’t have to tout for business. People from all walks of life were coming to us with propositions, like the two Jewish car dealers in Birmingham who wanted to talk to us about a Rolls-Royce. They were very peeved because they’d been ripped off by another car dealer called Nick, who had a business in Harrow, northwest London.
This Nick, whose surname I can’t divulge, was a very rich man. He had picked up a paper one day and seen an advertisement for a Rolls for £8,000, so he sent a young guy of nineteen to Birmingham to put a £2,000 deposit on the car. The young lad also offered a cheque for the outstanding amount. It wasn’t even a legal deal – you couldn’t have credit unless you were over twenty-one – but the young guy was very sharp and the Birmingham dealers went for it hook, line and sinker. Then the cheque bounced, too, so they were fucked for £6,000.
They gave us all the details, but what they didn’t tell us was that they had had Nick over a year or so earlier for a car out of his company in Harrow. What Nick was doing was getting one back at them.
I asked, ‘What’s in it for us?’
They said, ‘If you can recover the car, we’ll give you half its value.’
We took the job on condition we were given £500 expenses up front. They came to London with us, booked us into the Russell Hotel in Russell Square and took us to Nick’s pitch. It was lovely. He had Bentleys, Rollers, all sorts of expensive cars there. You could tell at a glance that he was loaded.
This is where we called our old bus driver friend Paddy Dinnear in again. Chris and I had a talk with him and we decided to pile up to this place in Harrow four-handed. We gave Paddy a pick-axe handle and told him to run into Nick’s office, smash it across his desk and say, ‘You fucked us out of £6,000. We want it now or you’re in trouble.’ We agreed that Chris and I would follow within a couple of minutes and hold him back.
He did exactly what we asked. Chris and I went in, pulled Paddy away from Nick, who was on the floor in a terrible panic, and said, ‘We want the car or we want the money.’
He was whimpering, ‘I’ll give you anything you want, but don’t hurt me.’ Then he asked, ‘Can I talk to you?’
I said, ‘You can talk to us all day long, but we still want the car or the cash.’
He then gave us his side of it, and told us about the Jewish car dealers having him over. ‘The car doesn’t mean a thing to me,’ he said, ‘I just don’t want them to have it. If you boys want to make a nice killing I’ll give you the value of the car, and I’ll also give you a cheque – which the bank won’t pay out – for you to give the Birmingham men.’
And he did. He gave us our money, and he wrote a cheque for £8000, making a deliberate error so that it would not be paid. We went back to the dealers in Birmingham and told them we had the dough. I waved the cheque in front of their faces, put it away again and said, ‘You’re not getting this until you give us our half of the money in cash.’ One of them came to the bank with me and paid over £4,000. Then I handed him the cheque, which he immediately put in his pocket. Five days later, he realised he’d been had.
So we made £12,000, plus expenses. Nick lost £8,000. And the Birmingham car dealers got burnt very badly, to the tune of £18,500. The whole issue was this: they went to criminals. As the saying goes, you live by it, you die by it.
But the story didn’t end there. This Nick from Harrow got in touch with me and Chris and said: ‘I’ve always got a use for people like you two. I’m willing to put you on a retainer and, should I ever need you, I’ll call upon your services.’
I replied, ‘I do a lot of work for the Kray brothers. I’ll have to see what they think about it, and we’ll take it from there.’ When I mentioned it to the twins, Ronnie said, ‘Keep it for yourself.’
From then on, I started meeting Nick at the bar of the
London Hilton Hotel every Friday to collect a retainer of £800. Chris and I would have £300 each and my Nicky £200. Nick, through his wealth and through paying out money at that rate, was leaving himself open to a lot of things. I phoned him up one night from a call box fifty yards from his house and told him I wanted to see him immediately. He said, ‘I’ll see you in an hour.’ I got there within five minutes. Chris was waiting outside, round the corner, because Nick claimed my eldest brother made him feel uncomfortable.
A young boy wearing a white pinny answered the door. I said, ‘Is Nick there?’ I walked in and went straight into the bedroom. Nick was in bed with another young boy with a pinny on. I said, ‘It’s not my thing, what I’m looking at here, but I have to stay here to tell you that we need £5,000 right away.’
‘I’ll have to give it to you tomorrow,’ he answered. I said, ‘We need it urgently.’
He asked me to wait outside the room. I did, but I was watching what he was doing through the crack in the door. He got out of bed, and I saw he was dressed as a woman. Then he moved the bed away from the wall to reveal a built-in safe. I saw him count out £5,000. He called me in five minutes later, by which time he was back in bed.
‘Thanks for the cash,’ I said. ‘By the way, we’ll see you again next week.’ And we upped his money to £1,000 a week. I was still drawing it six months after I was nicked for the McVitie murder. That’s what a violent reputation can do for you.
He knew we were connected. He knew he was being had over. He knew what we were up to. It was protection money. Protection he never even needed.
Cars and car dealers were a recurring feature of our time in Birmingham. Another one who fell in love with the romantic idea of bringing criminals into his life was a man called Tony Hart, who acquired my Mustang and Chris’s Galaxy 500 for us.
Hart, an ex-club bouncer with the gift of the gab, was the proprietor of a garage and car wash company which was virtually on its knees when he invited Chris in to help revive the business. I went to Walsall, just outside Birmingham, to meet him. He wanted to slaughter the garage, make a quick profit out of it and then get rid of it. He asked me, ‘What prison sentence would I get if I ran this as a long firm?’
‘Between four and seven,’ I replied.
He was prepared to accept that, and he started ordering large amounts of goods. He wanted Chris and me to run the car wash firm, the legitimate end of his business, which was making a good profit. We agreed to keep it ticking along, mainly for our own amusement. Every night we’d cut up the takings, and we’d make about £200–300 a week out of it. He would also give us a little whack out of what he was defrauding from the garage.
But we knew that something wasn’t right about him. Overnight he changed the way he dressed from suits and boots to a black Crombie overcoat with the collar turned up, and he started telling people that he was a friend, a dear friend, of the Krays. In the end, Chris and I had to have a talk with him; I whipped him with a pistol and whacked him round the head a couple of times. To our surprise he loved it, and then started putting it round Birmingham that he had been pistol-whipped by Ronnie Kray. Just for the glory of it.
He wanted to be a nine-to-five gangster. At the end of the day he went home to live a normal life with the wife and kids, but at work he revelled in his imagined image. He even started to cultivate prison mannerisms. Long-term prisoners form certain habits: they walk around with their hands behind their backs, shoulders straight and eyes down, and they whisper out of the corner of their mouths. He began doing this around the garage forecourt. Chris said to me, ‘He thinks he’s on exercise.’
We were living like kings, though. We got Hart to book us into the Albany Hotel through the company, and we were still involved with the car wash when we got nicked with the twins. Then we forgot about him straightaway.
But he started to visit Chris in Wandsworth and me in Brixton while we were on remand. I was called up for a visit one day, and when I walked into the visiting room Hart was standing there in a trilby with tears streaming down his face, his collar rolled up and his hand on his chest. He shouted across the room, ‘I should have been in the dock with you boys. It was all my doing.’ This was the type of person that you could attract if you weren’t careful. Eventually he went into debt to the tune of about £180,000, at least some of which was down to our extravagant hotel bills.
After our trial, a spate of stories began to appear in the papers about what we had got up to in the Midlands. Who was the author? Tony Hart. According to him he wasn’t scared of us – although he kept a shotgun under his bed – but his wife lived in utter fear. We apparently asked him to bury people for us, and he was all the time in contact with the Birmingham Regional Crime Squad, tipping them off about what was going on. It was a pack of lies from start to finish.
He wound up getting a few years for the garage long firm, and unfortunately he served some of his time in Leicester prison while I was there. I was in the maximum security block and he was on a level above it. He kept throwing pieces of paper with messages over the exercise cage – ‘Anything I can do for you…’ I was forever picking up little notes with Tony Hart’s name on them.
Another bizarre character from the Birmingham era was Richard Forbes, a multi-millionaire whom we came across one night in the Cedar Club. Chris and I were having a drink with one or two of the boys when all of a sudden bottles of champagne started coming up. We were then told that everything we wanted was on the house, down to this Richard Forbes. Chris had met him somewhere along the line. I never had.
I didn’t really pay him a lot of attention that night because we were in female company, just out enjoying ourselves. But the next morning I woke up where we were staying in Harts Hotel – nothing to do with Tony Hart, I might add! – and outside in the grounds was a brand-new white Ferrari. Chris said, ‘It belongs to that Richard. He seems all right.’
Richard duly came down to breakfast drinking a bottle of vodka. He went, ‘Look, my father owns a steel works and he gave me half a million pounds, five horses, a flat in Birmingham and a cottage in the country to stay out of his life.’ He was also drawing on a pension fund set up by his father. He never carried cash, only cards, and he was a raving alcoholic. A couple of days later he came round again, this time in a powder-blue Aston Martin DB6, a James Bond car. He changed cars like they were going out of fashion.
In a way, Richard Forbes was courting us. He loved the atmosphere around Chris and me. He obviously didn’t need us in a financial way, but we needed him. Here was a man who thought it would do him favours to be connected to criminals, and he was prepared to spend large amounts of money. If someone comes up and wants to give you money for nothing, why refuse? There are some people in this world who want to give money away, and I never saw anything wrong in taking it off them.
One day he turned up at the Albany in a new Jensen, phoned me in my suite and asked me if I would like to go riding. I agreed. I was wearing jeans, a shirt, a jacket and ordinary shoes. He was dressed up like Prince Charles with a topper, a red hunting jacket, breeches and boots, and had a whip in his hand. What I found more fascinating, though, was the bottles of vodka sticking out of his pockets. We came out of the stable and were cantering along this road when he insisted on stopping at an off-licence for yet another bottle of vodka. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before he and his horse started disagreeing with each other…..
Sober or drunk, Richard Forbes would always insist to me and Chris: ‘If you want anything, just ask me for it.’ I always found, after entering into professional as opposed to amateur crime, that there was no such thing as a demand for money (except if it was owed), and I personally never uttered a direct threat in any of the situations I profited from. It was mainly a matter of persuasion. But Forbes, like many others, didn’t need any persuasion. He was one of those people who wanted to be on the right side of us at all costs, for the ‘glamour’ as much as anything else. He paid everything. He paid hotels, he wanted to buy us cars.
We had him around us purely and simply to pick up the tabs. He invited Ronnie Kray to his cottage in the country and he wanted to take him abroad on a cruise. He would have given Ronnie anything, but Ronnie didn’t go. He didn’t want to know. Ronnie was busy, anyway – as I knew from my other life in London.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FEAR AND FORTUNE
At the time I came out of Bristol prison, just before Christmas 1966, the twins were into having new faces on the firm. I was a young guy, smartly dressed, useful, reliable, and they wanted me to be around them. Within days, I became a party to one of their most closely guarded secrets.
I was asked to drive a member of the firm, Scotch Jack Dickson, to a flat in Barking. When I pulled up outside I saw another member, Albert Donaghue, open the door. I noticed he was pushing someone back, someone who was trying to stick his head out, and I recognised him straightaway: Frank The Mad Axeman Mitchell. I was shocked, and didn’t want to know too much about it. Frank had been in prison for many years for violent crime. On one occasion, he had escaped and had terrorised an elderly couple with an axe while robbing them. He was subsequently recaptured, but now he was on the run again. It was common knowledge in our circles that the twins had organised Frank’s escape from Dartmoor, but his whereabouts were being kept very quiet.
I knew Frank well. He was a simple man in many ways, a big man, very well built and immensely strong. You couldn’t fight him – he would just crush you up. Everybody knew about him: he was a legend.
I remember Frank arriving at Wandsworth prison while I was there, almost two years before his escape. He’d been brought from Dartmoor in a coach which was carrying two men called Mitchell, a little weedy one and big Frank. The prisoners had to leave the coach, which was surrounded by about ten screws, as their names were called.
Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror Page 10