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

by Lambrianou, Tony

  ‘Mitchell.’ The little weedy one stepped off the coach, and the screws started heckling him – ‘So you’re the Mitchell’ – and pushing him about. All of a sudden a big hand came out. ‘No … I’m the Mitchell.’ That was a standing joke around the prison for months.

  The screws came to realise that you couldn’t give Frank a direct order and expect him to carry it out. It was physically impossible to punish him, so they treated him very gently. But he didn’t always respond to this softly-softly treatment in the way they wanted. When the Governor came into the S1 shop – the high-security workshop – on his daily rounds, Frank used to like to pick him up and carry him around, to the delight of every con in Wandsworth. He made the Governor promise to behave himself.

  Frank never knew what a normal life was like. He had spent most of his time behind bars from an early age, and rumour had it that he was never to be released. The twins had a great affection for him – they looked after him in a lot of ways and they got him out of prison simply to help him. The idea was to use the escape to bargain for a release date for Frank, while he remained hidden away. When it was given, he would return to Dartmoor.

  But the authorities were not forthcoming with a date. And Frank wasn’t a man you could control. He didn’t see things in a rational way, and from what I understand he had his own ideas about what he wanted to do. The situation was getting dangerous, for Frank and everyone around him. Apparently this led to trouble between Frank and certain members of the firm. I was busy with other things, and nobody was talking too much about what was going on. Finally I heard that Frank had been shot dead, just before Christmas.

  The twins had nothing to do with his murder, as was shown in court when they were acquitted of it. I did hear that Frank had been killed by Billy Exley, an ex-boxer who was on the fringes of the firm. He vanished from the scene after Frank’s disappearance. That was the rumour at the time, and rumours carry a lot of weight. In criminal circles, rumours are usually correct. Exley’s name came up quite a few times. The whole tragedy of Frank Mitchell is that he ended up dead over something that had started with the best intentions in the world.

  It was often said that the twins could have two hundred armed men on the street within an hour if they wanted, and at that time they could, without any doubt. But the twins were an army on their own. There will never be another two like them. They took the lot on. They got London by the scruff of the neck and they didn’t ask permission. They just went there and took it, because they knew they could.

  The firm they gathered around them was composed of people who could be relied upon in the three areas they were concerned with: villainy, business and image. Image-making was a very important part of the operation. It became an essential part of the legend which was building up round the twins, and that legend gave them more and more power as it grew. The more fear they could inspire, the more successful they would be. If the Krays did something, it had become twenty times bigger by the time the story reached the bottom of the road. The twins were well aware of the advantages of this, and they knew that if there was going to be one big picture, then it had to be larger than life in every way.

  They were good at putting out an impression of danger. Both of them had minders, even though they were the last two men in London who needed them. Some people on the firm, like Tommy The Bear Brown, were brought along for show on social occasions. Tommy was a gentle giant, a very likeable person and a good friend of the twins since they were boys. Standing at about six feet three, his eighteen stone of muscle dwarfed everyone: He was a handsome, white-haired man with a kindly face, except when the twins wanted him not to look kindly. But Tommy was never really used in any of the activities.

  The twins could lay it on lovely when they wanted. They could have every major face in the East End in a pub on the same night, and all of this was particularly useful when Chris and I brought our clients down from other cities. They would see a very impressive show.

  The whole of the Kray empire revolved around fear. That was the key to the lot of it. And it was a very real and deep-rooted fear, as I soon discovered. The more I became involved with the firm, the more my own friends became frightened of me. I didn’t encourage this. I did try to have a bit of a separate life and go out on a Friday night with my mates to the Queen’s Arms in Hackney Road. But I could see the difference in their behaviour; I could sense that their reactions to me were changing. They became wary of me. Sometimes I’d invite them to come over and have a drink with the twins and they’d shy off. Their attitude was: ‘We don’t want to fuck about with them. They’re dangerous. They go beyond.’

  Some characters’ fear of the firm was so overwhelming that they were driven to acts of sheer lunacy and ended up bringing upon themselves the very trouble they had dreaded in the first place. One example of this happened after we made a meet with a man called Walter who had some plates for printing forged money. Chris and I went to see him in a pub in Notting Hill Gate with Peter Metcalfe. Eric Mason and Davy Clare, who had established an uneasy peace with the twins, were there too.

  Eric had been freelancing around the country, and he knew this Walter’s firm. Because he also knew us, he became the go-between in our dealings. That night, he’d pulled Davy in for back-up. We wanted these plates, and so did various firms; they were worth a fortune, and they had been causing big fall-outs amongst a lot of people.

  Walter wasn’t there when we arrived, so we ordered a drink while we were waiting. We saw three Irishmen in the bar, navvies about six feet tall and built like the proverbials. They were with a woman who was wearing a pair of tight leopardskin trousers. Eric Mason, who always had an eye for the ladies, saw her at the jukebox. He walked over, put a coin in and said: ‘Would you like to pick some records out?’

  One of the Irishmen got up and said to Eric, ‘You’re talking to my woman.’

  Eric replied, ‘I’m very sorry about that, but I don’t really see what it’s got to do with you.’

  Standing on the bar was a big red glass vase, and all of a sudden I saw Eric go to pick it up. The Irishman tried to throw a right-hander at him and Eric cut him to pieces – he did him in the face with the vase. All he had left in his hand was the stem of it.

  The barman let the Dobermann out and came running round with the ice pick. The bar was U-shaped, and in the middle was a big, fancy glass display unit. Chris grabbed this barman, threw him straight over the bar into the unit, picked up the dog and sent him flying over as well. Then we completely demolished the pub. All the windows went.

  Meanwhile Walter walked into the pub, saw what was going on, thought it was something to do with the plates because of all the aggro they had caused so far, and did a runner. That’s fear of the firm.

  We caught up with him at a flat in Brick Lane in the East End. Davy Clare knew where he was staying and took us there, and as we got out of the car we heard two loud bangs. I saw this Walter firing a pistol at us. One bullet went in the side of the car, and another missed Davy’s head by an inch. We got hold of this geezer and we beat the shit out of him. He was stabbed up the behind and he had a tendon cut. He had to have about 150 stitches.

  He didn’t even have the plates, although he was supposed to have brought them to the pub. In later weeks we discovered that the plates had been broken and were therefore useless, so no one ever got their hands on them or the money. You can be a millionaire one minute and a pauper the next….

  In happier circumstances, the general fear of the twins could be turned to the advantage of individuals who needed help. One day a man called Peter who owned a café in Bethnal Green approached me and said: ‘Can you get me a gun?’

  I said, ‘What do you want that for?’

  ‘I’m hoping to have the basement done into a restaurant,’ he replied, ‘but we’ve already had tearaways going down there and smashing the place up.’

  I told him, ‘I can’t just do that, but I’ll go and talk to somebody.’

  I went to see the twin
s: Ronnie said, ‘I’ll go down there on Saturday and have a meal.’ He was famous for his bit of plaice, Peter.

  I told him, ‘I’m going to bring someone here on Saturday. Just look after him.’

  Sammy Lederman and I accompanied Ronnie to the café, and we sat at a table for a couple of hours. Peter never had a problem there again, for which he was eternally grateful. It solved itself, just through Ronnie Kray coming in for his dinner.

  That story illustrates yet again that it wasn’t the use of violence, but the fear of violence that kept everything afloat for the twins. People knew what the consequences would be if they didn’t play ball. The truth is that the twins never used violence unless they had to, because the fear was usually enough. They certainly never used it as much as people would like to believe. If anything they would avoid it to an extent, but if you crossed them you were crossing the wrong people.

  Who in their right mind would want to take them on? I never saw anybody throw a punch at either of them. No one ever threatened them, because if you did you paid the price. It was well known that if they had to be ruthless, they were there to the limit. They were deadly. And I’m talking about violence like you’ve never seen.

  Their whole reputation was built on their violence, so it stands to reason they were more than prepared to use it to safeguard their standing as the top men. Play the fool with them, and you would expect to get it. When they gave out a kicking, it was a kicking – inevitably a hospital job. When weapons came out, it was for something more serious. They’d cut people, or they’d shoot them in the leg. If a challenge was sent out, it was met with a challenge. If anybody played up with a person or property they were protecting, threatened or attacked any of their friends or the firm, adversely interfered with their business affairs or tried to cheat them, woe betide the one who was causing the problem.

  The twins were always prepared. A lot of people around the East End were carrying artillery of some sort or another, and the twins had to live with all sorts of rumoured threats to their lives. It was said at one time that other gangsters were planning to shoot them from the railway bridge over Vallance Road.

  But all of this was kept within the criminal community, amongst ourselves. It’s been said so many times it’s a cliché these days, but we never involved innocent people. I have no reason to lie now. I’m out, and it’s all in the past. I can only think of one instance when someone who was not in criminal circles suffered injury. He came to a party in a flat in Manor House with friends, who, we assumed, had told him about the company and what sort of behaviour was expected.

  Reggie, Tommy Cowley and I had been in the Regency Club to pick up some drink. We arrived at the party to see Ronnie steaming out of the flat, followed by a young fella and a model, who were friends of his. He was going: ‘Fucking liberty!’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Reggie asked.

  There was a geezer in there holding a towel to his face and three girls screaming their heads off.

  It transpired that Ronnie had hung his coat up on a hanger in the hallway. Then these people arrived at the party. The bloke took Ronnie’s coat off the hanger, flung it on the floor and put his own coat up. When Ronnie went out to get his Players from his coat, he saw it on the floor. He came back into the room with the coat which had replaced his on the hanger. ‘Who does this belong to?’

  The guy said, ‘It’s mine.’

  Ronnie opened up his face.

  If Ronnie let someone throw his coat on the floor, he was leaving himself open for others to treat him disrespectfully. Everyone who came unstuck asked for what they got, and not one victim ever complained or came back whingeing that they didn’t deserve it. If the twins took action against someone who later on turned out to be in the right, they would be the first ones to make it up. I’ve never heard anyone accuse them of taking liberties. I’m not trying to justify the things that happened; I’m not saying that what the twins did was right; but it was right for them in their position at that time. It was villains among villains, people who lived by our code, people who knew the rules and were fully aware of what would happen if they chose to break them.

  What the Krays actually did in London at that time was keep the peace. They kept all of the villainy under control. No one stepped out of line. They hated grasses, sex offenders, people who committed crimes to do with women and children – ‘They’d better leave town.’ They couldn’t stand petty housebreakers. The twins would never have stood for muggings and the sort of street crime that’s going haywire today. In those days the East End was a better and safer place for the general public to live in, and I feel a bit proud of that. The twins did a job that the police couldn’t do, and there are a lot of coppers who would admit it. The twins should’ve been given a bleeding medal.

  I was present on various occasions when Reggie and Ronnie had to administer their own swift form of discipline. There was a pub party one night in the Old Horns in Bethnal Green. Ronnie had just come back from a trip to New York where he had met some Mafia people and the boxer Rocky Graciano, who had given him a portrait. He was in good spirits; he had brought some American friends, the Kaufman brothers, back with him, and wanted to show them the real East End.

  The firm was all present. David Bailey, the photographer, was there with his Roller parked outside. There was a Wakefield boxer called Johnny Guitar, and an Irish minstrel called Kevin O’Connor, as well as a couple of midgets whom Ronnie liked to have about. The Clarke Brothers were dancing on the stage.

  I was watching their routine when all of a sudden I heard a bang, and I saw the Clarkes’ eyes widen in absolute horror. Something had happened behind me. As I turned around, I saw a fella fall backwards off a stool and start writhing around on the floor. Ronnie had done him in the eye with a glass. We grabbed this geezer and chucked him out of the pub. What he’d done was march up to Ronnie and stare him straight in the eye. That was a direct challenge. He knew full well who Ronnie Kray was, and Ronnie couldn’t let people do that to him.

  Another night we went into this club in Knightsbridge, a little drinker. A man called Johnny Cardew was sitting in there, drunk as a sack. He came from a well-known family of brothers from the Angel.

  He said to the waiter, ‘Get some drinks over to that table, including the fat one.’

  That was intended to be a reference to Ronnie, who didn’t hear it. So we had a drink and left. We were in a car passing Marble Arch when one of Ronnie’s friends said, ‘Do you know what he said about you?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Ronnie said.

  We turned the car round and drove back there. Ronnie told us to wait outside the door. He went in there on his own, called Cardew into the toilet and never said a word to him, just gave it to him right down the face.

  Afterwards, obviously, there had to be a meet with Cardew’s brothers over it. Ronnie called them round and told them why Johnny got it. And they said, ‘We accept that what he did was out of order.’ And that was the end of it.

  The Cardews used to come to the Carpenters Arms regularly after that to see the twins, and there Johnny would be, with a big, broad groove in his face. He was given a new nickname: Tramlines.

  Ronnie said to me one day, ‘He deserved what he got, Tony’, and I understood. Someone was taking a liberty. If no one had taken action, he would have got away with it. But the twins had to be on top of things like that. It was very important.

  A similarly insulting comment spelled trouble for two brothers called Billy and Jimmy Webb in another Old Horns drama. My Chris had known the Webbs during the late fifties, and we were all having a drink together when something was said to him. He walked over to Ronnie and said, ‘If it wasn’t for respect for you, Ron, I would have shot him,’ meaning one of the Webbs.

  Chris then left, and the next day when I phoned the twins they asked to see me. Ronnie said, ‘What’s the trouble with Chris and these Webbs?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ I replied.

  The next night I walked
round the corner from Blythe Street to the Old Horns and saw Ronnie, Reggie, my Nicky, Scotch Jack Dickson, Ian Barrie, Teddy Berry, Tommy Cowley, Sammy Lederman and the Webb brothers. Ronnie and the Webbs were on high stools at the bar, and Nicky was standing by them. At the other end of the pub was a man called Ivor, who was a sort of groupie around the villains. He said he knew the Richardsons. He came in with the Webbs but sat at a different side of the pub. He was always coming to me with little business deals that amounted to nothing. He really wanted to get in on the fringes of what was going on.

  I walked over towards Reggie. He was talking to this Ivor, who was shitting himself. Reggie then turned to me and said, ‘When it goes, I’ll grab hold of him.’ I knew it was going to be heavy.

  By the time I got back to Ronnie’s end of the bar, Ron had hit one of the Webb brothers in the face with a pint glass. He’d said to Ron, ‘I was in the nuthouse, same as you was.’ As soon as he said that, he was right off the stool. A couple of the boys were setting about the Webbs, and I turned round to see Reggie with a gun, telling Ivor, who was against the wall, ‘You move and you’re dead.’

  The Webbs got a hiding and I dragged them both out of the pub and round into an alleyway. They were going to get it anyway because they’d upset Chris, and the twins would not let that pass. But the comment about the nuthouse sealed their fate. That was something you didn’t say to the Krays.

  The hanger-on, Ivor, had insulted Reggie earlier in the evening by getting over-familiar, which was strictly not on. Reggie had asked me, ‘Do you know who this geezer is? He keeps asking questions.’

  So it didn’t surprise me to see Reggie giving him a good whack while, on the other side of the bar, Ronnie, Sammy Lederuran and my Nicky were kicking the hell out of the Webb brothers. Reggie had decided not to use the gun, but all of a sudden the knives came out – Albert Donaghue and Ronnie Hart wanted to cut Ivor to pieces. Ironically, they were two of the people who later stood in court pointing the finger at other members of the firm for violence.