To begin with, the whole thing was strangely constructed. I was sitting on a double murder trial when one of the murders, that of George Cornell, had nothing to do with me in law. What happened was that they had a body on one case but not on the other, the McVitie murder. Jack The Hat on its own would not have stood up, but sticking the Cornell case alongside it made it look stronger. They put the two murders together and linked them through Ronnie’s alleged words: ‘I’ve done mine, you do yours.’ Yet Ronnie, as I’ve explained, never said that.
It was a show trial, and they wanted the whole gang. Reggie had already offered to plead guilty to Jack The Hat, and Ronnie to Cornell, if the other charges were dropped, everybody else was released and no recommendations were stipulated on the sentences. But it was a no go deal. Two men were no good. It was the whole firm versus the Metropolitan Police.
But the worst damage of all was done by members and associates of the firm who gave evidence against us. It didn’t take the brains of Einstein to see that they were out to save their own skins and blame those in the dock for the violence that they’d willingly participated in throughout their careers. That was the saddest, most sickening thing – to see people you’ve had a cup of tea with, shared a fag with, standing up and showing that, when the crunch came, their so-called loyalty didn’t mean a thing. I think the twins were shocked and disappointed.
Let’s get it right. We’d all done wrong, but some of us didn’t try to worm our way out of it by blaming other people. If the grasses had got up there and told the truth we might not have liked it, but we could have lived with it. If they had admitted their part and told it as it happened, it might not have changed the course of the trial, but at least we would have gone down knowing that the truth had been told. But when we heard them telling lie after lie, there was no way we could accept that. God almighty – it was unforgivable!
Scotch Jack Dickson was one of the worst. After he was nicked he decided to become a witness for the police, and during the trial he claimed he had realised at a certain stage that ‘the murders have got to stop’. He had been involved up to the hilt, and now he claimed he was saying it had to stop…. He drove the car to the Blind Beggar, Ronnie and Ian Barrie went into the pub, Ian fired a couple of bullets into the air, Ronnie shot Cornell stone dead, they returned to the car, went back to the pub … and Scotch Jack knew nothing about it?
Another thing that repulsed me about him in the Old Bailey was when he was asked to state whom he drove to the Blind Beggar. He said, ‘The fat one sitting there’, meaning Ronnie Kray. He would never have said that to Ronnie’s face in a million years; he would never have had the guts in normal circumstances. The whole court went quiet. Ronnie Kray just looked at him and turned away.
Scotch Jack stood in the witness box for two days, and even the judge got sick of him. Stevenson said: ‘You cannot believe a word that this unsavoury character has said in this court today. We will make him a hostile witness.’ Which meant that he was to be perceived as someone with a vested interest in putting the twins away.
Known as Scotch Jack Jonah after Ronnie’s brief, John Platts-Mills, mixed his name up, he became the laughing stock of the court. Later he wrote a book, Murder Without Conviction, which was published in 1986. A lot of it was untrue. This is a person who came to London to put himself on the twins’ firm. Why didn’t he say in his book what he did to us – that he became a grass? If I saw him today, I’d spit on him. I wouldn’t hit him – he wouldn’t be worth it. I wouldn’t like anyone to harm him: it would be a sin. Let him live to a ripe old age, living with what he did, looking in the mirror and seeing what he is, every day. He’s a disgusting piece of work.
I wish the same for Ronnie Hart. He put Ronnie Bender in the McVitie murder from top to bottom. He said Bender got down and pronounced Jack The Hat dead. Nonsense. Ronnie Bender wasn’t in the room when it happened. Hart also gave evidence about the driving away of the body, naming Bender but not me and Chris. This was because Ronnie Bender had gone back to Harry Hopwood’s house after the murder, and, looking for a bit of glory in the twins’ eyes, said, ‘I got rid of that, Ron.’ He didn’t mention that Chris and I had been involved, so Hart, who was listening, didn’t know. What he later told the police about the disposal of the body therefore didn’t include our names. That’s why we were never charged with that part of it, and that’s why Ronnie Bender got an extra five years – just by wanting to take the credit in front of Hart, Hopwood and other witnesses.
But Hart did more than that. He wasn’t prepared to help the police unless Freddie Foreman was arrested, because he was afraid of what Fred might do. He told the police, ‘You don’t get me into the witness box until Foreman’s inside.’ So Foreman had to be put in the frame. And the way Hart did it was to bring Fred and Charlie into his story as accessories after Bender’s alleged disposal of the body. This couldn’t have been true, because it was me who drove the body away. Nevertheless, Hart carried on with his tale. He said that, while he was at Harry Hopwood’s, Ronnie Kray asked him to get hold of Charlie. The upshot of it all, according to Hart, was that he drove Charlie to Freddie Foreman’s pub to inform him that there was a body on his manor. He further claimed that Freddie said, ‘Leave it down there – I’ll take care of it later.’ But Freddie Foreman had nothing whatsoever to do with the body of Jack The Hat.
Hart also blamed Ronnie Kray for taking part in the McVitie murder, which, as I saw myself, Ronnie had no involvement in. Ronnie Hart played a leading role in what happened that night. When I was called into the office in the Regency, who was there? Hart. And when the murder itself happened, Hart was not the innocent bystander he protested he was. Every other person in that room could verify what I say. Up until the arrests, Hart had been out to prove himself a Kray. But he was never like them, as he showed in the end. He even married Blonde Vicky, one person who could have put him fairly and squarely in the frame, a month before the trial started. Our briefs asked for access to her, and back came the message: ‘She’s married Ronnie Hart, and there will be no access.’ Hart knew that a wife could not in law be made to give evidence against her husband, and this meant she could not be a witness for the defence.
After we went down Hart approached Fred’s wife Maureen, her solicitor and a private detective. Obviously worried about the consequences of framing Foreman, he was now ready to clear Freddie’s name of any connection with the Jack The Hat business. The meeting was held on an estate somewhere in Harlow, Essex. Maureen, the solicitor and the private detective had a question-and-answer session prepared for him: Next thing, the police broke in and arrested the solicitor and the private detective for trying to pervert the course of justice. Hart said, ‘I told a pack of lies. All I know is that the twins killed McVitie, and other than that, I know nothing.’ The case against the solicitor and private eye was then dropped.
Next, Hart wrote a statement for a respected national newspaper, saying he had told lies at the Old Bailey. And this was the star witness against the lot of us!
He went to Australia with Blonde Vicky and tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists a couple of times, because he couldn’t sleep with the wicked thing that he did. I hope he lives to be a thousand. Since then he’s tried to sell books and stories, but to little avail. Whatever he got out of his betrayal, it wasn’t much. Talk about thirty pieces of silver. He certainly didn’t get any gold.
We heard lies, lies and more lies from Albert Donaghue, Alan Mills, Billy Exley (in the Cornell case) and Carol Skinner – Blonde Carol – whose inconsistent testimony was actually questioned by the judge. Before she stood up in court, she made a statement to say that she saw various people in her flat that night who were disposing of evidence just after the murder. She named me, the twins and Ronnie Bender, amongst others. She also stated that she saw Chris pouring a bucket of blood down the toilet.
I never saw Blonde Carol during that part of the night. And I’m sure if she had been there, somewhere, Chris and Ronnie Bender would have
let me know, given the serious situation we were in. I can honestly say that neither of them mentioned her to me. I didn’t even know Blonde Carol. I’d seen her at the Regency a couple of times, but I’d never met her and I’d never been to her flat before.
After we’d driven the body away on the night of the murder we came back to Evering Road and Blonde Carol was there, helping to clear up with Connie Whitehead and a bloke she used to go out with called George Plummer. She didn’t know who I was, and she didn’t seem to notice I was there. In court, she was asked to identify the people she insisted she’d seen that night. She picked out Chris, the twins and Ronnie Bender, because she knew them. Then it came to me, and she couldn’t put my face to my name, which she’d given. They kept giving her a cue in court – ‘Who else did you see there that night?’ – and she looked up and down the dock, over and over again in response to the same question, and failed to identify me. This went on for about half an hour.
The judge, realizing what was happening, called an adjournment for lunch. My brief jumped up and said, ‘It’s important that this woman finishes giving her evidence’, but the break went ahead. Blonde Carol came back into court after lunch and ‘identified’ me immediately.
This is how I believe Nicky was dragged into the picture when we were first questioned about Jack The Hat. In my opinion, Blonde Carol was aware that someone had come back to the flat with Chris, after the driving away of the body. Without looking too closely, she assumed it was Nicky because she knew him and had seen him around with Chris.
Even the judge told the jury: ‘I want you to think very, very carefully about this woman and ask yourselves, if she’s lying, why?’ None of us have ever discovered the answer to that.
Blonde Carol also claimed as part of her evidence that she’d seen me six weeks after the murder and that I’d told her to shut her mouth if she knew what was good for her. That was a bloody lie. I didn’t say it. If I had, I’m sure she might have remembered my face in court. Anyway, she would have been the last person I wanted to talk to. I don’t like to slag women off, but from what I’d seen of her around the Regency she certainly wasn’t my cup of tea.
The twist to Albert Donaghue, who had pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the murder of Jack The Hat, was that he made himself a grass when he didn’t have to. He said he tidied up and redecorated Blonde Carol’s flat after the murder. Yet, if he had stood up with us and kept his mouth shut, what would he have got for cleaning up a flat? No more than what he received anyway, which was two years.
It was an education finding out whom we could and couldn’t count on in the end. Frankie Fraser spoke up for us in court. He was one of the first ones to offer, regardless of what was being said at the time about animosity between the Krays and Fraser and the Richardsons. He was brought from Wandsworth prison to stand in the witness box for us, and it did him no favours in the eyes of the authorities regarding his future, but he was a man of honour.
Not so Tony Barry, one of the brothers who ran the Regency. They had always been well liked, so to hear the two of them telling blatant lies about us took a bit of stomaching. Tony brought the gun round on the night of Jack The Hat and was charged with murder, same as us. But he’d gone the police’s way by admitting his part of it. He was terrified of the twins and the rest of us, and he claimed that I’d approached him in Brixton prison and told him what would happen if he gave evidence against us. It wasn’t true, but he got his way. They put him on Rule 43 protection, which meant that he was kept away from us in prison for his own safety, and during the trial he stood apart from us in the dock with three prison officers around him.
I’ll always remember the evening there was a mix-up when we came back from court. We were being put into cells opposite reception, waiting to be escorted over to the special wing. They always used to take Barry off first and lock him in. On this day a screw who didn’t know the situation opened the door to his cell and Fred and I walked in, smiling at each other. As the screw went to shut the door, Tony Barry shouted, ‘You can’t do this’, with a look of terror on his face. Ten screws came running up, and Fred and I had to leave. If we’d been able to stay in there … well, we wouldn’t have been too happy with Tony Barry, would we?
He told the court he’d been living in fear of the twins. Yet, if it hadn’t been for the twins, his club would never have survived. The Kray name alone carried weight, and the Regency needed that. Like a lot of people who put Reggie and Ronnie down at the end, the Barrys forgot the times they went round to the twins for a bit of help.
Tony wasn’t involved in the murder; I know that. But if he hadn’t called me into the office that night, maybe I wouldn’t have been involved in it either. John Barry came to court to save his brother’s skin by giving evidence against us. I can understand how he felt about Tony being charged with murder, but then again my brother too was standing in the dock charged with murder – yet it didn’t mean that I had to get up and lie about other people.
He told one story concerning a flat called the Dungeon in Vallance Road, claiming that we held meetings of some sort of protection committee in there. Our connections with the Dungeon began when the writer John Pearson said he wanted to absorb the atmosphere of the East End. Ronnie said, ‘I’ll show him the fucking East End’, and put him into this bare flat with a bed, a payphone and a second-hand telly. John Barry came down there one night, purely on a bit of business, when we were all having a drink together. But in court he claimed that he had walked into the Dungeon and found the twins, Ian Barrie, Ronnie Hart, Albert Donaghue, Scotch Jack Dickson, Ronnie Bender, Chris and me sitting there as a tribunal. He said he was brought there to appear before this committee which decided how protection was to be paid, and at what percentage. Rubbish. It never happened.
Johnny Barry was no angel. He was a well-known fence, and he’d had a lot of dealings with my Nicky. Anything Nicky had to sell, he’d buy. One day, shortly before we got arrested, Johnny said to me, ‘It’s right in your interests to come and see me in the office at the club on Saturday morning.’ I had to ring the side bell because the Regency was closed during the day, and when I reached the office it was like walking into the Bank of England. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Johnny Barry had £l million worth of forged £5 notes in there – cartons and boxes full of them. He said, ‘These have just been printed, and none of them have gone out yet. We’re going to flood the country with them, all in one hit.’ He gave me £100,000 worth. They had to be sorted out – some were good, some were bad. Our idea was to take them to Birmingham, and in the end the notes did go there – but there was no return on them.
Johnny Barry did lots of things. How he could stand in the witness box, knowing what he’d done, and say the things he was saying made no sense to any of us unless he’d made a deal with the police to get himself out of a charge of forging banknotes. While Barry was giving evidence, Reggie drew a £5 note on a piece of paper and kept holding it up. And when I was in the witness box I said, ‘I’ll tell you what Barry’s got to hide, £1 million worth of problems.’
In later years, Johnny Barry went to prison. Other cons bashed him up and one, Dave Martin, did him with boiling water. That’s the life he chose for himself the minute he made himself a grass.
In the end, the trial got out of hand. We never knew what was coming next. Anyone could get up and say anything about us and it was believed. Plots in Africa, dictatorships in foreign countries, poisoned darts in briefcases…. It got too preposterous to be true. No wonder Ronnie Kray asked, ‘Who’s on trial here – Ronnie Kray or James Bond?’
Newspapers reported that we sat in the dock yawning and treated the whole thing as a joke. We never saw it as a joke. How could we? When you’re sitting in a dock and allegation after allegation is being made against you and there’s nothing you can do about it, you simply tend to lose hope. ‘Should we go along with this charade?’ is more your feeling.
The things that were going on affecte
d all of the people around us. Families were going to be wrecked. Throughout that trial, my father and Charlie Kray were there every day without fail. My father-in-law, Flip, took it personally, because he saw that justice wasn’t being done. It hurt him greatly, and he worried for his daughter and our two kids. Pat’s side of the family were decent people.
There was a three-day summing up, and then the interminable wait in a cell while the jury were out deciding on the verdicts. Reggie was trying to relax himself, Ronnie was saying nothing, Connie Whitehead was saying nothing, Charlie was trying to be chirpy, and Ronnie Bender kept saying, ‘Come on, we’re going to get “Not guiltys” here.’ I was taking in the picture before me – nine very smartly dressed men who looked as though they could have been at a party. It was almost as though nothing had changed…..
After what seemed like an eternity, I was called out for my verdict. It was like standing in a chapel. Rays of light were coming in through the big, top windows, and one fell directly on me. I’ll never forget the jury foreman, a stocky man of about fifty, with greying hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a brown suit. He didn’t look me in the eye when he spoke the word: ‘Guilty.’ No one spoke, no one smiled, in the court, but there was a sound, just like a sigh. What was going to happen now?
All of a sudden, I snapped out of it and went back down to the cells. The first thing Ronnie Kray said after he was found guilty was, ‘I’m glad it’s all over, I can get into my bird now.’ He kept talking about going on a world cruise when he came out.
Ronnie Bender was cracking jokes. No one complained. I think we were all trying to show a brave side to ourselves. Yet it all still seemed a million miles away. The next day, the day of the sentencing, would say it all.
Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror Page 17