When the firm was at the height of its power, Charlie never took an active part: he wasn’t seen around, except on social occasions. He had his family, he had his own career as a businessman and he only ever helped his brothers on the business end of things. But he was aware of the twins’ position, and he was loyal to them. I always got the impression he was closer to Reggie than he was to Ronnie.
They were very staunch family people, the Krays, and the twins were always fiercely proud of their roots. Much has been made of all their nights out clubbing with celebrity friends, but the twins liked nothing more than to be among their own people. They’d sooner spend a night in the pub in Bethnal Green than glam it up in the West End of London.
Any celebrities they came across, they brought into their own areas of life, not the reverse. Contrary to what has been written about them in the past, they didn’t seek to glamorise themselves, although they eventually became glamorous because of their show business connections and their club ownerships. They never forced themselves on showbiz people; it was the other way round. Many celebrities knew the twins could open doors for them socially because of their legitimate club interests and sought their company, although when the cameras came out Reggie and Ronnie undeniably saw the opportunity for good public relations. Other well-known personalities, of course, were aware of the twins’ notoriety and wanted to know them for that reason. Wealth and crime tend to mix, and showbiz and crime mix even better; wealth, crime and stardom are an eternal triangle.
Entertainers, actors and actresses and sportsmen spent hours with the twins in clubs. I met Sonny Liston, whom I found to be a little bit aloof, among a host of champion boxers, and I shook hands with singers Lenny Peters and Joe Brown, both very likeable chaps. Christine Keeler, who sparked the Profumo political crisis of the sixties, was photographed with Reggie and Ronnie.
Some lasting friendships did grow out of these celebrity liaisons. Diana Dors and her husband Alan Lake were very, very nice people who had a real fondness for the twins, as did Barbara Windsor, another East End girl who never forgot her roots. Judy Garland was a genuine friend who was proud of her connections with them; she was the guest of honour at one of their pub nights in Bethnal Green.
You never knew who you were going to bump into next when you went for a drink with the twins. One night I had a meet with them in the Old Horns. Two Scottish guys were in the company, one of whom was destined to become an extremely well-known criminal: Jimmy Boyle. At the time he was on the trot from the police and, like most villains, was more interested in seeing the East End than the West End. Jimmy was the same age as me, and he was very well regarded in Scotland at the time. My Nicky and I showed him round a few pubs at Reggie’s request, and he turned out to be a very polite fella, nothing like his reputation. A few weeks afterwards he was nicked and charged with murder in Scotland.
It was around the same time that I met Freddie Foreman, at a party with the twins. He had his own pub, the Prince of Wales in Lant Street, south London, a minute’s walk from where I live today. Of all the people I’ve met in my life, Fred had had the roughest end of the stick. He was charged with three murders he didn’t do, and was acquitted of each one. Every other serious crime there is he was accused of at one time or another. He had a great love of children and family life, Fred, and he was a big fan of boxing and sport in general. I always knew him as a man of integrity and honour. Recently, there was a disgraceful attempt to belittle him when he was dragged on to a plane in Spain and sent back to England to appear in court. He was subsequently found not guilty of participating in the £26 million Brinks-Mat gold bullion robbery at Heathrow in 1983, but he was convicted of handling money from it and sentenced to nine years – an outrageous sentence. Had it been anybody else, it would probably have been two years.
Ronnie Knight, Barbara Windsor’s ex-husband, has also been suspected of an involvement in Brinks-Mat. I first met Ron in the Kew Club in Paddington around 1967. He was the archetypal ‘likeable villain’, a rough and ready man who liked a party. He owned a club, the A & R, in the Charing Cross Road in partnership with Fred. Another one from a family of brothers, Ronnie has had his share of tragedy in life. One of his brothers was shot dead in an arcade in Soho. Ron was accused of murder in what was said to be a revenge attack, and acquitted. Now he’s in Spain and feels that, if he came back to England, an injustice would be done to him regarding Brinks-Mat. Again, it’s a case of ‘give a dog a bad name’. I hope to God his problems sort themselves out.
The twins’ nose for the law was second to none. Sometimes we’d be in company when, out of the blue, Ronnie would announce, ‘The law’s about, we’re leaving.’ Everything would stop and we’d move out immediately. Nine times out of ten, he’d be right: the strangers he’d noticed would indeed be coppers. Every pub Reg and Ron went into was thoroughly checked over by members of the firm before they arrived, as a security measure against the police and other villains. If you saw Albert Donaghue, for instance, you knew the twins weren’t far away. They would take over the door and put their own men there so they could keep tabs on who was coming in and out. Photographers in clubs frequently had the film in their cameras taken off them, and anyone who came over, making themselves busy in a drunken state, would get a right-hander. A drunken man can be a dangerous man, and the twins didn’t like that.
I had my phone taken out because it was bugged. If I rang Ron from a call box, he’d keep it short and sweet. He’d say, ‘Come round’, and slam the phone down. If he was in one of his humorous moods, he’d often say, ‘You may as well go and have a tea break,’ before the phone would go down.
We all began to get paranoid about police surveillance. A friend of mine, Billy Taylor, told me that he once set up a meet with the twins and they were so convinced they were being set up they made him sit in the Grave Maurice until their solicitor came and reassured them that everything was all right. In my experience, if they weren’t sure of someone they would shun that person.
We never really looked upon it as a personal vendetta with the police. The twins were not men to slag off the law; they were polite, not ignorant or insolent. They had a certain respect for the law as a foe. I’m not talking about the local bobby on the beat, who I suppose puts up with the brunt of the flak, but the gangbusting squad which had by now been set up especially to investigate us. That squad, I’m certain, developed a reciprocal respect for the twins, whether the officers admitted it or not. I think the twins did expect to be nicked at some time, but none of us had any idea of the scale of the operation being mounted against us. Much less did we anticipate the consequences of its eventual success.
I felt safe around the twins at the time. Being in their firm gave me a sense of security, a feeling of being amongst my own. In many ways, we were just like all of the other gangs we dealt with. They also had their characters, they were in it for the money, they relied on who they knew, what they were capable of doing and what went out over the grapevine, and at the same time they were mostly men of principles and respect. You gave respect and you got it back, inside and outside of criminal circles.
But beyond these areas of common ground the twins were different, and people knew it. They were often called upon to solve disputes between different firms, and they were very good at it. Their leadership, through sheer personality and character, was all-powerful – so capable you couldn’t imagine anything going wrong. They were the organisers and we worked under their umbrella, which we trusted.
Everything was done properly. When they were having a business meeting, Ronnie would listen to the basics and the prospects, then Reggie would take over and discuss the finer details. For the most part, they conducted their affairs in the same orderly, efficient manner. It was reassuring.
The twins weren’t people who would take orders off anybody: They never backed down and they didn’t pretend. If Ronnie Kray said he would do something, he would do it, come hell or high water. If he gave his word, he kept his word, whether he was m
aking a threat or a promise.
Not many would go to the lengths they did, in every respect of life. They had their own very keen sense of right and wrong. They would always take the side of the underdog, if they thought that someone was intimidating or taking a liberty with a weaker person. My brother Chris could never stand a bully, either. He was very much in the same mould as the twins, and they recognised that in him.
Their loyalty to members of the firm was absolute, and they expected the same in return. They gave their men a good living and a lifestyle which included all the fringe benefits you could think of. But certain people abused the twins’ trust, took the benefits and then took advantage, long before the final betrayals at the Old Bailey. If you had an animosity with someone else in the circle, it would have been easy to go to the twins and say, ‘He’s a wrong ’un’, and wait for them to take action against that person. This did happen. They were used by people whose word they trusted to hang out some dirty washing that they should never have been involved in. Scotch Jack Dickson, a man few of us liked, engineered one or two such episodes.
Scotch Jack was fat, with pug features and dark hair pushed back off his face. He’d been in the army with Ian Barrie, I think in a tank regiment, and they’d come to London together – much to Ian’s later disgust – to put themselves up for the firm. The twins always liked a Jock around them.
Ian, who had been sent down by a Scottish firm, was worth his weight in gold, as the twins would subsequently discover. He became Ronnie Kray’s right-hand man. Jack, however, ended up just doing a bit of running around for them, and he used to stick their name up everywhere.
Scotch Jack was a very unsavoury character, the sort of person who would beat someone up for their social security money without a thought. He would violently injure people, ponce money off those who couldn’t defend themselves, and once beat up the local milkman because he wanted his girl off him. Surprisingly, he got her. He later married the woman, Stella, and they deserve each other.
One night at a party, when things were dying off, Scotch Jack walked around the room picking up all the boxes of cigarettes, taking any which were left in the packs and filling them all into one box for himself. He didn’t feel that he should have to put his hand in his pocket, not even for a drink or a cigarette.
Because he was connected, he thought that was his passport to live on Easy Street. ‘Here I am on the firm, I can do what I like.’
He frequently went to the Regency, and he used to wait for people he knew in there to buy Stella a drink. He wouldn’t think of buying it himself. I saw him beating up a kid one day, while Stella sat there laughing and drinking. That’s the sort of people they were. If the twins were ever accused of being liberty-takers, it was never their own fault. It was down to people like Scotch Jack doing things in their name.
On one occasion Scotch Jack Dickson had an argument with Connie Whitehead, and Whitehead rightly stuck a glass in his eye. Dickson went whingeing to Ronnie. On the strength of what Scotch Jack had said, Ronnie wanted to do something about it; but he was persuaded by other people to change his mind.
On another night, Dickson got a right-hander in the Regency from a man called Johnny Shea. So Dickson went whining back to the twins about Johnny. He said, ‘He called you a pair of mugs.’ It was a pack of lies: Johnny Shea never said it. We all knew him, and he was a sound man. I liked him. In a drink, like anyone else, he might say the wrong things, but he was a nice bloke.
Ronnie Hart, the twins’ cousin and another less agreeable member of the firm, was ordered to shoot Johnny Shea because of the remark he was alleged to have made to Dickson. Hart was instructed to hit him in the body and not kill him. He burst into Shea’s flat and shot him in the hand. It wasn’t warranted, but I must add this: Shea never held it against anyone. He was the first one to come to the Old Bailey in defence of us lot – to stand there and do what he could to help us. At the same time, the man from our firm who had set him up, and the one who shot him, were busy giving evidence against us.
If Dickson ever achieved anything in his life it was this: while he knew Reggie and Ronnie Kray, he was granted some type of respect. They invited him in and they fed him. After all they did for him, he manipulated the support they offered to suit his own purposes, and when it came to getting nicked he was one of the first to stab them in the back. The twins used to hear some bad things about him, but because of his connections with the firm they wouldn’t want to believe it, partly because he’d come down from Scotland with Ian, who was greatly respected. They were very loyal. They protected him to an extent, but even they got to the stage where they said, ‘Enough is enough,’ and pulled him up about his bullying.
Scotch Jack wasn’t the only person around the twins to take advantage of their loyalty. And in other ways, things were not entirely happy within the firm. There was a lot of mistrust between us all, and there were various people stirring up trouble, trying to curry favour with the twins and score points off the rest of us. I find that sad now. The twins were aware of a lot of what was going on, and they were good at juggling it about when it suited them, keeping one in favour and another out. On the surface, everything was sweet. Underneath, it certainly wasn’t.
CHAPTER NINE
A PERIOD OF TURBULENCE
Ian Barrie and Ronnie Bender were the only two members of the firm who became personal friends of mine. Most of the others were easy enough to get along with, purely through our common working interests, although I disliked Scotch Jack Dickson and I never had a great regard for Ronnie Hart.
Hart was roughly the same age as me, not a bad-looking man, smartish, fair-haired and a bit of a ladies’ man, like Donaghue. He was a cousin of the twins, and his real involvement with them began when he escaped from Eastchurch prison on the Isle of Sheppey; they took care of him then because of the blood connection. He let it be known that he was a Kray and took full advantage. He thought he had a licence to go anywhere in the twins’ name and do what he liked. He’d cut people, knowing full well that, because of his connections, they could do nothing about it. Hart saw himself as some sort of third in command, and he tried to give orders out to members of the firm. Obviously, it was to be laughed at – nobody took it seriously. He would have been nothing without the twins. Technically, they let him get away with it for a while. He hung around them more than I suppose they wanted him to, but they put up with him because he was a relation.
He came to me and Chris one day with a deal. He had taken money to shoot – but not kill – somebody in Romford Market. He went to the market with Scotch Jack, they fired a shot in the air, and Hart reported back to Ronnie that it had all gone wrong.
Ronnie called him a liar, and said he’d see someone else about it. That’s when Hart asked me and my brother to do it. The deal was, Hart would say he’d done the job and he’d cut the grand with us. I went to see Ronnie Kray and he couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘Forget all about that, we’ll take care of it in our own way.’ I think the twins were a bit amused by it.
Certainly, the rest of us treated Hart as a joke. But he wouldn’t prove to be so funny later on when it came to the arrests. When the going was good he was first past the post, but when the going got tough he was last. He told lie after lie to save his own skin when the police picked him up.
That didn’t surprise me in a big way, but Albert Donaghue’s betrayal certainly did. He was Reggie’s personal minder, a very deep bloke and one of the few we all felt we could rely on. Everybody respected him. I liked him as a person, and on a few occasions I went out with him socially. Albert was on the East End payroll; collecting protection, and I did the rounds with him a couple of times. We’d visit around forty pubs, stopping every now and again for a drink, and an envelope would be passed to him in each one.
All in all the twins had a good income, not only from the protection rounds but from their legitimate club interests in the Kentucky, Esmerelda’s Barn and El Morocco. Charlie had a business too, a tie firm in Mare Str
eet.
Protection payments were known as ‘pensions’, a word which became famous through our trial, and most of the firm were given what we called ‘sweets’. You would have a pay-out from one particular place, and what you got out of it was your business. It was yours – in the twins’ words, ‘Get your own sweets.’ It was a wage of sorts. I personally never got involved in the sweets because I was earning commissions through my public relations work. I made my money my way.
The twins eventually promoted Albert to the West End with Tommy Cowley, collecting from club owners like Pauline Wallace, who ran the Pigalle, the Stork and the Society among others. She was one of the best-known greyhound owners in England. One night on the round, she said she was going away to the States for ten weeks and wanted to pay all the protection up front, which amounted to a lot of money. She eventually moved to America for good and settled in Florida, a multi-millionairess.
Albert Donaghue lived in Bow with his wife Pauline and a couple of kids. He was a dangerous man, feared in the East End: I saw him stab a couple of people. He had to be good, because of his personal job with Reggie, who was very explosive at the time. In my mind there were no two ways about it: Albert was more than capable of killing a man.
On one occasion Dickie Morgan’s girlfriend, Sally, invited a bunch of us round to her ground-floor flat in Bethnal Green. There was Dickie, Albert Donaghue, my Chris, Nicky and I, Ronnie Bender, the Cardew brothers from the Angel, and two other men called Billy Thomas and Micky Bailey. I gave Nicky a .38 pistol to hold on to for me. We always had one near us. Always.
Suddenly an argument broke out between Billy Thomas and Dickie Morgan’s brother, Martin. One of the Cardew brothers poked his nose in too. As it developed, a secondary row started between Albert Donaghue and Billy Thomas, who was a good friend of his.
Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror Page 13