by Dick Kirby
Mancini later said that he had gone to the billiard hall ‘simply to see what all the fuss was about’, although it certainly appeared that the violence which followed was orchestrated, since Thomas Mack, a former member of the Italian Mob, also arrived. He had impressive credentials: in 1922 he had been sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour for riot, and following his release, he and Mancini had both been sentenced to one month’s hard labour in 1924 for assaulting a bookmaker. Twelve years later, Mack had gone on to better things when he received three years’ penal servitude for his part in what became known as ‘The Battle of Lewes Racetrack’.
Precisely what part Mack took in the frenzied fighting which followed it is difficult to say, since he disappeared shortly afterwards. However, it was fortunate that Albert Dimes’ older brother Victor, a professional wrestler, was present, because before his sibling became deeply involved in the bloodshed he grabbed hold of him and pinned him to one of the wrecked billiard tables. It certainly saved Dimes from the gallows, because Mancini then thrust a dagger to a depth of five inches into Distleman’s left armpit. As the noted pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury later observed, this was sufficient to sever the axillary artery and the accompanying vein. Staggering into the arms of three onlookers Distleman told them, with considerable justification, ‘I am terribly hurt. He has stabbed me in the heart. Babe’s done it.’
As Distleman lay dying on the pavement outside the premises, there to be found by two patrolling police officers, Mancini, by now completely out of control, chased Fletcher between the billiard tables, slashing at him with the dagger and severing the tendons in Fletcher’s arm before, finally mollified, dropping the dagger and going home. Fletcher returned to Charing Cross Hospital where he was undoubtedly welcomed as a regular client.
*
Enter Divisional Detective Inspector Arthur Thorp from West End Central police station. He was then forty years of age, a tough boxer, much of whose service had been spent in London’s West End. He was fairly unconventional: when men complained that their wallets had been stolen by Soho prostitutes but nobody would admit the identities of the owners or tenants of the rooms used by the girls, Thorp would suggest to the aggrieved party that he ‘might like to work the room over a little’ – and would then avert his eyes as the victim systematically wrecked the premises.
Mancini handed himself in the following day and told Thorp, ‘As I was going upstairs, I heard somebody behind me say, “There’s Babe – let’s knife him!’” He admitted slashing Fletcher but denied murdering Distleman.
At the Old Bailey, Mancini was given the opportunity to plead guilty to manslaughter, and this would certainly have been accepted by the prosecution. Instead, in an act of almost unbelievable recklessness, he pleaded not guilty to everything: Distleman’s murder, inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent to murder Fletcher or with intent to cause him grievous bodily harm. This decision was stupid for two reasons: (a) the weight of evidence was very much against him, and (b) since Italy had declared war on Britain thirteen months previously, there were very strong anti-Italian feelings amongst solid, middle-class British citizens, especially those who made up a jury at the Old Bailey and who were decidedly disapproving of Italians wielding daggers.
In fairness, although there was little sympathy for the deceased – he had run a team of racecourse pickpockets, had six convictions for assault and ran a chain of brothels, together with his brother, ‘Big Hubby’ Distleman (otherwise known as ‘Hymie the Gambler’ and thought to be a highly active police informant)1 – the jury nevertheless found Mancini guilty of murder, and on 4 July 1941 Mr Justice McNaughton duly donned the black cap. Mancini appealed, first to the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) and, when that was rejected, to the House of Lords, all to no avail. It was Albert Pierrepoint’s first hanging as Chief Executioner at Pentonville Prison on 17 October 1941, and as he slipped the hood over his client’s head he was rather unnerved when in a slightly muffled voice Mancini called out, ‘Cheerio!’
Following Mancini’s conviction, Dimes, Capocci and Collette appeared before the Recorder of London, Sir Gerald Dodson, on a charge of unlawfully wounding Fletcher. However, it appeared likely that some of the witnesses had been inappropriately ‘spoken to’, and on two occasions Sir Gerald plaintively asked the prosecuting counsel, ‘Is it worthwhile going on with this case?’ He later added to the jury, ‘There is no evidence to show that they did anything more than engage in a rough-and-tumble,’ and eventually Capocci was acquitted, with Sir Gerald telling the other two, ‘You were probably expecting prison and no doubt you deserve it, but I am going to bind you over.’
And he did so; Dimes and Collette were bound over in the sum of £5 to be of good behaviour for a period of three years, although Dimes was later sentenced to six months’ detention for his selfimposed absence from the RAF.
By the time of his death in 1942, ‘Big Alf’ White had shared his former associate, Sabini’s, lack of success. Sabini died in 1951, penniless and forgotten, with Thomas Mack following him into oblivion two years later.
In the same way as when the Kray brothers were incarcerated, twenty-eight years after the Mancini incident, this left a void in the ranks of criminality and there were plenty of gangsters willing, indeed eager, to fill that vacuum. We’ll make a start by focussing on Tommy Smithson, whose criminal career was just getting underway at the time of Babe Mancini’s demise.
CHAPTER 1
Tommy Smithson – ‘A Perfect Nuisance’
Tommy Smithson was considered to be seriously ‘game’ by the East Enders of the 1950s, an accolade for courage and daring normally only bestowed upon one of their own – something, in fact, he almost was. He had missed the sound of Bow Bells at birth – a necessity to claim true Cockneyship – by a distance of 178 miles, because he was born in Liverpool in 1920 (the sixth of eight children); but two years later, the Smithson family relocated to Hoxton.
He acquired a number of convictions, including a spell in Borstal, before joining the Merchant Navy as a stoker. Discharged in the 1940s, he returned to his old haunts in the East End, only to find that a large number of Maltese had set up gambling and drinking clubs as well as running strings of prostitutes, and Smithson, with his love of gambling, decided that the Maltese were ripe to be fleeced.
Smithson certainly had charisma; he was a former fairground boxer with a reputation for fighting to the point of rashness, and few of the Maltese club owners wanted a confrontation with him. He worked a crooked roulette wheel with Antonio Benedetta Mella, aka ‘Big Tony’, a failed (just five bouts) heavyweight boxer, and also as a croupier with George Caruana at his club in Batty Street, a side turning off the Commercial Road, Stepney. However, it was not too long before Caruana (who owned several other clubs) was transformed from employer into victim, as Smithson nipped him (as well as many other club owners) for a shilling in the pound from their dice games; and that was just the beginning.
Smithson was enhancing his reputation as well as obtaining a great deal of illicit income – much needed, because he had a fondness for silk shirts and underwear as well as being generous towards his friends. He was married but separated from his wife, and in 1948 he met twenty-year-old Zoe Progl, at that time out on licence from Borstal and later to become known as ‘The Queen of the Underworld’. They had much in common: both had been Borstal inmates, both were thoroughly dishonest and, since both were highly sexed, they began a passionate affair. However, in March 1949, he left to go to Manchester on ‘unspecified business’ (in fact, it was an eighteen-month sentence for robbery), and by the time he returned, a year later, he discovered that he was the father of a baby boy. Annoyed that Zoe was bringing up a baby in what he accurately referred to as ‘a house full of prostitutes’, Smithson set up home with Progl in a flat above a café in Shrubland Road, Hackney where both mother and child were showered with gifts.
But Smithson’s gaming rackets at dog tracks and clubs, crooked though they were, were losing money,
and both he and Progl came to the conclusion that it might be more profitable to concentrate on more old fashioned villainy. She acquired a job as a clerk in a factory which lasted just long enough for her to discover that the weekly wages were delivered on Thursdays, for a Friday payout. On her final Thursday she left a window open so that later she, Smithson and two of his gang could climb in and remove the safe, containing £7,000. Within a week, their share of the loot had vanished, after Smithson’s near-lunatic betting at dog tracks and ‘spielers’ (illegal gambling clubs), where the races, card and dice games were undoubtedly every bit as crooked as his own. A week later, silk worth £4,000 turned up in the basement of their flat, but although the police raided the premises, both Progl and Smithson managed to walk away unscathed.
Smithson also ran a billiards club in Archer Street, Soho, and his generosity extended to permitting twins who were on the run from their National Service – their names were Reggie and Ronnie Kray – to sleep there, an act of kindness never forgotten by the brothers.
However, by 4 September 1951 the romance with Progl was over. That was the date when he met twenty-seven-year-old Fay Richardson at a restaurant in Baker Street Originally a mill girl from Stockport, Richardson could not, by any stretch of the imagination be described as a raving beauty, but she was a one-time prostitute and men had found her attractive. Before they parted, Smithson presented Progl with a diamond ring worth £500 in case she fell on hard times.
Meanwhile, the romance with Fay Richardson flourished, as did Smithson’s protection rackets. Unfortunately, this would bring him into contact – indirectly – with Billy Hill, the self-proclaimed ‘Boss of Britain’s Underworld’. Hill had left his faithful wife Aggie and had taken up with a Phyllis May Blanche Riley – known as ‘Gypsy’. Allegedly a former prostitute, and the possessor of a fiery temper, in September 1953 she was annoyed by a former acquaintance, a pimp known as ‘Tulip’, and asked Frederick ‘Slip’ Sullivan to throw him out of French Henry’s nightclub. Sullivan was somewhat past his sell-by date; in 1936 he had been acquitted of breaking and entering, and in 1952 it was rumoured that he was one of nine men who had participated in the £287,000 Eastcastle Street robbery, which had been masterminded by Billy Hill. Although he was rapidly approaching middle age, Sullivan did succeed in ejecting Tulip, who in fairness was much the same age – it was rumoured that the expulsion included the pimp being deprived of half an ear – but unfortunately, Tulip was protected by Smithson and therefore satisfaction was required. A savage altercation between Smithson and Sullivan ensued, the latter emerging from the confrontation with his throat cut (either as a consequence of a sharp implement being wielded or as the result of being chucked through a plate glass window). This was not the best year of Sullivan’s life; later he was sentenced to twenty-one months’ imprisonment for assault and following his release, in January 1955, he was stabbed to death by his girlfriend, Mary Cooper, who successfully claimed self-defence. Meanwhile, regarding the Smithson/Sullivan confrontation, Hill decided that Tommy Smithson had gone just a little too far. Smithson thought so too, because he promptly went into hiding, but within a week he was lured out on a promise from his former employer, George Caruana, that matters could be settled amicably. A meeting was arranged at the back of the Black Cat cigarette factory in Mornington Crescent, Camden Town.
That Smithson possessed limitless courage is not disputed. He was not, however, the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was accompanied to the meeting by Paddington club owner, Dave Barry, who although he had served prison sentences, including one for manslaughter, proved not to be the staunchest ally one could wish for. Smithson had brought with him a Luger, but when he was greeted by Jack Spot and told that this would be a peaceful meeting, he surprisingly handed it over – not that retention of the pistol would have benefited him, since he had forgotten to obtain any ammunition for it.
To most fighting men with a penchant for self-preservation there would surely have been the smell of danger in the air, but Smithson failed to detect it. Opinions vary as to what happened next. One version has it that a dozen thugs leapt out of a lorry and attacked Smithson; another that there were just four of them: Jack Spot, Billy Hill, Moishe Goldstein, aka Blueball, and Slip Sullivan’s brother, Sonny. But whatever the case, Barry took to his heels and Smithson was subjected to a ferocious beating. He was punched, kicked, hit with an iron bar which broke his arm and, whilst Spot held him down, mercilessly slashed all over his face and body by Billy Hill – the wounds on his face alone would necessitate forty-seven stiches – then run over by the lorry (twice) and, according to various sources, either left in the street or thrown into Regent’s Park. If the latter, the gang must have conveyed him there by a circuitous (and time-consuming) route – perhaps it is more likely that he was deposited in Harrington Square Gardens, which was much nearer. Hill thought, with considerable justification, that he had killed Smithson, and on Jack Spot’s instructions Moishe Goldstein summoned an ambulance, prudently leaving prior to its arrival.
That Smithson did not succumb to his injuries was nothing short of miraculous; everyone – the villains out on the street, friends and acquaintances, the doctors at Charing Cross Hospital where he was found to have lost five pints of blood – expected his imminent demise. It was a view certainly shared by Divisional Detective Inspector John Gosling from Albany Street police station, who visited the hospital the following morning whilst Smithson was receiving a blood transfusion; just one eye and a corner of his mouth could be seen among the swathe of bandages covering his face.
Who was responsible for the attack was London’s worst kept secret – everybody knew, including Gosling, who had spent a tremendously successful career with the Flying Squad and had been a founder member of the ultra-secret post-war Ghost Squad. He wanted nothing better than to arrest Jack Spot and Billy Hill, and if Smithson lived – he admitted that this was unlikely – he hoped to obtain a written complaint which would secure their convictions. But that time was not yet; leaving him in the care of two detectives with strict instructions not to permit any visitors, presents, letters or telephone calls, Gosling left the hospital to pursue another investigation. But when he returned, four hours later, he found Smithson sitting up in bed and lighting a cigarette, having consumed a four-course meal – and he knew immediately that someone had got to him. It was said that Spot had paid him either £500 or £1,000 (multiply by at least twenty for today’s values) for his silence – and he got it. Billy Hill, in his memoir Boss of Britain’s Underworld (Naldrett Press Ltd, 1955), in which he referred to Smithson as ‘Brownson’, remarked, ‘But even when he was breathing what he thought was his last, he didn’t sing. No, the cozzers tried everything to make him talk but that Brownson just kept his mouth shut.’
And so he did – then, at any rate. He discharged himself from hospital five days after the attack, and when his paramour, Fay, removed the bandages they revealed a total of seventy-eight stitches which had been used to sew his body back together again. Describing himself as looking like ‘the tracks running into Charing Cross station’, he swore revenge on his attackers. He bought a share in a nightclub in Old Compton Street which was promptly shut by the police, then swiftly purchased another which was similarly closed down.
But when he was accused of being a police informant, he was attacked again, and this necessitated another twenty-seven stitches being inserted in his well-worn face. It is highly likely that it was in a spirit of revenge that he put Gosling in the way of a stash of two million stolen cigarettes, a ton and a half of sweets (still subject to post-war rationing) and several other valuable commodities secreted in farm buildings belonging to two brothers at Pitsea, Essex. The brothers went away for three years each at Leeds Assizes, and the informant – whoever he was – received thousands of pounds worth of reward money from the loss adjusters. It was probably coincidental that, following the payout, Smithson was spotted swaggering around London’s West End wearing extremely expensive suits to complement his
silk shirts.
With Smithson it was a case of ‘easy come, easy go’; he opened clubs and bookmaker’s offices, but when the money ran out, he was raided by the police and the courts committed him to prison in lieu of paying a fine, his friends organized a whip-round to secure his release.
And so it probably would have gone on, with Smithson obtaining and losing money and delivering beatings and receiving them in return (one from former associate Tony Mella, who cut his face open), but in June 1956 Fay Richardson was arrested. She had stolen a wallet containing a chequebook and had obtained ten gramophone records from a London store by false pretences as well as a dress from a Bond Street shop; having made an appearance at the Magistrates’ Court, she was remanded in custody because when arrested she declared that she was of ‘no fixed abode’, undoubtedly to stop the police coming round to search the premises which she shared with Smithson where they might have found goodness knows what. Her case was not improved by her stating that she was employed as a barmaid, something easily disproved, when in fact she was working as a prostitute’s maid.
Now Smithson was in a quandary; all he had to his name was a ‘pony’ (£25); to provide an adequate defence for his girlfriend would require at least £100. He decided to obtain ‘subscriptions’ and his first port of call was George Caruana – after all, he and several associates armed with iron bars had frightened some cash out of Caruana a few weeks previously, on an unrelated matter. Caruana handed over £50; however, Smithson thought this was insufficient and at midnight on 13 June, he and two associates, Walter Edward Downs and Christopher John Thomas, both aged thirty, met up in Windmill Street, Piccadilly and from there went to a café in Berners Street, where they saw Caruana. Smithson demanded £100 in total and to reinforce the request head-butted Caruana in the face, knocking out a tooth. Downs produced a flick knife and lashed out at Caruana, who put up his hands to save his face; his fingers later required six stitches. It was said that Thomas held the other occupants of the premises at bay with a revolver, although this was strongly denied by him. On Smithson’s instructions, Thomas took Caruana to hospital, where his wounds were treated; when they returned to the café, Caruana handed him £30 to give to Smithson.