by Dick Kirby
Falco was then cross-examined by James N. Dunlop, Spot’s counsel, who asked him, ‘You say you are a commission agent; are you also a driver?’
‘Yes’.
‘Do you drive for Albert Dimes?’
‘I work for him, but not full-time, only when we go to the races.’
‘Am I being naïve if I ask if Albert Dimes pays you a fixed salary?’
‘When he wins at races’, replied Falco, ‘I get wages.’
‘You know what Comer says about this charge?’
Falco replied, ‘I can’t read a lot. I’ve been told he says it’s a frame-up.’
‘And’, persisted Dunlop, ‘that the whole of the evidence you are giving is a complete fabrication?’
To this, Falco, with a complete disregard for his fate on judgement day, replied, ‘I am a good Catholic and I don’t take an oath to tell the truth unless I am telling the truth.’
The next witness was Johnny Rice, who although he was deeply involved with Hill’s bookmaking enterprises always described himself as a metal dealer, trading as J & J Spares, Evelyn Road, Richmond, Surrey. He did so on this occasion when, after being permitted to write down his address, he told the court he was a steel merchant and went on to corroborate Falco’s account.
Cross-examined, he was asked by Dunlop, ‘For services of some sort, do you receive money from one Billy Hill?’
Rice replied, ‘No, sir’.
‘Would it be right to say you drive for Billy Hill?’
‘No, it is wrong.’
‘You are known to very many people, aren’t you?’
‘Yes sir, but not in the racing world’, was Rice’s reply.
‘In the steel world?’ asked Sir Lawrence Dunne, which Rice also denied.
The rejection of an association with the racing world was a rather reckless remark for Rice to have made; it would rebound on him badly at the forthcoming trial.
Mannings gave evidence of arrest and then Dunlop asked him this: ‘Have you in your possession a statement taken from another person in which there is revealed a plot for something to be done in which Comer would be incriminated – and that statement is still in existence?’
‘Yes’, replied Mannings.
‘And in the story or plot, is there something very similar to the circumstances with which we are now dealing?’
‘Yes’, replied Mannings. ‘Similar’.
‘The crux is that Comer should be implicated?’ asked Dunlop.
Mannings again replied, ‘Yes’.
It must have become obvious that cracks of a considerable width were appearing in the prosecution’s case. Perhaps production of that mysterious statement could have stopped the case there and then; but it wasn’t, and it didn’t, and Spot was not only committed to the Old Bailey for trial but once again refused bail.
The trial, before Mr Justice Streatfield, got underway on 16 July 1956; Reggie Seaton (who else?) prosecuted and a real heavyweight QC, Victor Durand, appeared for Spot.
In outlining the case to the jury, Seaton stated that Spot’s clothing had been examined but no traces of blood were found; he suggested that Falco’s jacket had absorbed the spurting blood (and that was probably the case).
Falco entered the witness box and gave evidence similar to that which he had provided at the lower court, adding that he had known Spot for seven or eight years.
Asked by Durand the present whereabouts of Billy Hill, Falco told him he had ‘No idea’, adding, sulkily, ‘I’m not his keeper.’
‘Are you swearing there is no connection between you, Dimes and this person I call Billy Hill?’ asked Durand.
Falco replied, ‘No relationship’.
‘By Tuesday, June 19’, asked Durand, ‘was there in existence a plan for somebody in a list of names I have mentioned to you to be slashed and for Comer to be blamed for it – for someone in your gang to be slashed and for Comer to be blamed?’
‘I have never heard of any plan at all’, replied Falco, who was then asked why he had not told the police immediately that Comer was his attacker.
‘There were no police about at the time’, he replied.
Now Durand, terrier-like, tore into Falco: ‘If you had told someone and the telephone had got busy and the police had gone round and found Comer in bed, that would be the end of the case against him. I am suggesting that you dared not have the police going round to Comer’s address within minutes of you having been slashed.’
Falco did himself no favours with his answer: ‘I wanted to deal with it in my own way. I didn’t want to go to the police.’
‘What is your own way?’ the judge demanded to know.
‘The same way as he had done it to me’, replied Falco.
This answer infuriated Mr Justice Streatfield: ‘And so it goes on, this ridiculous sort of warfare. One man slashes another . . . you won’t put your worst enemy away but you will slash him.’
Rice was next in the witness box and he agreed to the description of his occupation as ‘metal dealer’. Unfortunately, he had been photographed taking bets at Brighton races two weeks earlier which prompted the judge to ask, ‘Is that a sideline from the steel business?’
Rice was obliged to answer, ‘Yes’, and furthermore, that he had bought the pitch from Jack Spot, whom he had known for fifteen years; and that there was no doubt in his mind that it was Spot who had cut Falco.
‘It has been suggested that you and others have put your heads together to bring a false charge against Comer. Is there any truth in that?’ asked Reggie Seaton.
‘I would not risk the liberty and lives of my children and wife and myself to do a thing like that’, replied Rice virtuously.
But cross-examined by Durand, Rice was asked if he knew a man named Victor Russo. ‘You mean “Scarface Jock”, that is the only way I know him’, he replied.
‘He was in your car that Saturday morning with Billy Hill, Dimes and you. During the conversation, Hill said, “We want someone to take a stripe from Spot, nick him, he’s got to get some bird”.’
‘I don’t know anything about that’, responded Rice.
Leaving the best bit till last, Durand asked, ‘What does “we want someone to take a stripe from Spot” mean?’
‘I would say “cut him”’, replied Rice, and with the jury quite obviously wondering what on earth was going on, that remark brought the first day’s excitement to a close.
*
The following day, Jack Spot entered the witness box and denied knowing about or having anything to do with Falco’s slashing. He told Reggie Seaton that he had been unable to work since the 2 May attack on him and that he had been living on his savings of £1,500 in a Post Office account in his wife’s name. He agreed that he had told the jury in the trial of Warren and Fraser that he did not know who his attackers were and said by way of explanation, ‘That’s because I was afraid I would get beaten up again.’
Spot agreed that in 1954 he had been fined £50 for an offence of grievous bodily harm (he described the attack on Duncan Webb as ‘just pushing a man’) and fined £20 for possession of a knuckleduster; his conviction for unlawful wounding in 1939 he artfully substituted as ‘an offence against the blackshirts’ – rather than Nat Simmons being ripped with a razor or Hymie Jacobs being bashed with a bottle.
Rita Comer gave evidence that she and her husband stayed at home during the night of the attack and that he did not leave the flat until later the following morning. In fairness, this was not the most convincing of defences even if it was true.
But the next witness for the defence was a wild card in the form of Victor ‘Scarface Jock’ Russo (described by the Daily Mirror’s Cassandra as ‘a hacked-up rat’ and ‘a mutilated gorilla’), who gave detailed, electrifying evidence. He stated that on 16 June he had not only met Johnny Rice (who was driving a Buick) as well as Falco, Dimes, Hill and Franny Daniels, but that they had gone to Peter Mario’s restaurant in Gerrard Street (where Henry Cooper had met his future wife, who worked there
as a waitress) and discussed a plan. It had been suggested that Russo should submit to being slashed in the face, the arm and the stomach. And when Russo raised the problem that Spot might well have a cast-iron alibi, Hill replied, ‘I’ll get Kye-Kye to find out.’
This was the nickname of Nathan Mercado, who traded as a bookmaker under the name of ‘Sid Kiki’ and who lived in an opulently furnished apartment in the same block as Spot and his wife. But why would he wish to assist in such an undertaking? Well, perhaps because it was rumoured that he had alerted Frankie Fraser & Co. on the night when Spot and his wife had been attacked outside Hyde Park Mansions – although this was subsequently strenuously denied by Mercado. But the plot was full of holes: how could Mercado (or anybody else) say with certainty where Spot would be at any given time to coincide with Falco being slashed?
Russo told the jury that eventually (after accepting £500) he had told Hill that he would have nothing to do with the scheme; but after he had read in a newspaper that Spot had been arrested, he had gone to the police.
This raises the following question: having obtained Russo’s statement, and in the light of Spot’s repeated denials, why did the investigating officers not pull in everyone named by Russo as being in Peter Mario’s restaurant? Yes, it was important to lock up a gangster like Spot in the first place, given the testimony of two alleged eye-witnesses, but given Spot’s denials plus Russo’s evidence, surely it was paramount to ascertain if there had been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice on a grand scale, one that involved a number of criminals, not least two of Soho’s leading lights, Billy Hill and Albert Dimes? Well, for whatever reason, this was not done, and the defence rested on three witnesses, all of whom had previous convictions and in Rita’s case, one for actually perverting the course of justice in order to get her husband off the hook. Would the jury believe them?
Reggie Seaton asked for permission to call three witnesses to rebut Russo’s accusations. The first was William James Kennedy, a coal miner, who told that court that whilst he was serving a sentence in Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, he had been told by Russo that he had ‘rowed himself into the Spot case’ and that he was going to say that the whole thing was a ‘get-up’. It’s difficult to see how this helped the prosecution. Russo had certainly ‘rowed himself in’ because he had gone to the police and told them that the whole thing was indeed ‘a get-up’, courtesy of Hill and the others.
The next witness was Billy Hill, who was allowed by the judge to write down his address. He stated he had known Spot since 1947 and admitted he had thirteen convictions, adding that ‘they were all for stealing’, conveniently forgetting his two convictions for robbery. He denied that Fraser and Warren were his henchmen, and when Durand suggested that Hill had described himself as ‘The King of Soho’, he replied that that was what a newspaper had called him.
‘What title do you take for yourself if it is not a kingdom or a dukedom?’ asked Durand and must have been delighted when Hill replied, ‘The Boss of the Underworld’. Quite apart from that cocky answer, Hill did himself no good whatsoever in the witness box. He slouched, spoke in monosyllables and answered questions before they were properly put. It was a performance guaranteed to alienate him from the jury, and so it did.
The third witness was Albert Dimes, who stated that he knew Falco, Hill and Rice, as well as Russo, whom he had known ‘for about ten years’. He denied, as had Hill, suggesting that Falco should be wounded so that Spot could be blamed; and that was the end of the second day of the trial.
On 18 July, Reggie Seaton appeared to have grave misgivings when he summed up for the prosecution, saying:
It has been suggested that certain people were attempting to prostitute the law, to bring about their criminal desire. The prosecution has no desire that anyone should frame the law to their own ends in order to achieve revenge. The only issue in this case is: did Comer wound Falco?
In his final speech Victor Durand told the jury that they might well consider their peace of mind had been violated by the idea of ‘The Boss of the Underworld’ using the High Court for his own ends. Referring to the evidence of Hill (‘a miserable little character’) and Dimes, he asked, ‘Was it likely that they would come forward and say there was a frame-up?’ and suggested that the court had been deceived by both witnesses.
The whole matter was now passed to Mr Justice Streatfield who said:
We all know what we have read and heard, that there has been, unhappily in London at any rate, something like gang warfare going on and heartily sick of it all respectable people are becoming. People slash one another by way of revenge with razors and otherwise beating them up. These things are a disgrace to modern life in this great city. We only wish something could happen to stamp it out and assuredly, it will be, because commonsense prevails in the end and law and order in the end is always established.
In connection with that gang warfare, the name of Jack Comer (or Jack Spot, as some people know him) has been mentioned before. First, do not allow your minds to be prejudiced merely because you thought that, in one capacity or another, he had been mixed up in a previous brawl. Secondly, you now know that it has always been Comer’s defence in this case that he is quite innocent and that it was a frame-up; in other words, that the injuries to Falco were caused by some other person he does not know. It may even have been staged for the purpose of fixing it upon Comer, so that he might suffer the penalty of the law. That is the defence but, members of the jury, you may think that the very existence of gang warfare may be a factor which lends colour to the possibility, at any rate, that this is in truth, a frame-up. On May 2, Comer was apparently attacked in the presence of his wife, outside his flat by a number of men. On June 15, two of those men, Warren and Fraser, were sentenced in this court to seven years’ imprisonment by Mr Justice Donovan. They had been found guilty of wounding Comer, and Comer and his wife were called as witnesses. One understands now that two other men have been brought back from Ireland and yet a fifth man has been arrested. The two men having been sentenced on June 15, it is now alleged that Comer did exactly the same thing to a man, five days later. You might think it very unlikely that a man who had suffered himself, and had seen two other men suffer the severe penalty of the law, should himself, within a matter of days, do the same thing.
It took the jury just twenty minutes’ deliberation to acquit Jack Spot.
There were calls in Parliament for Hill to be prosecuted, and the Director of Public Prosecutions demanded an enquiry, but within a month the whole affair fizzled out.
So who had cut Falco’s arm? It seems likely it was Johnny Rice; and in the same way it seems unlikely, given the outcome of the trial, that Falco received any recompense from Billy Hill or anybody else.
CHAPTER 11
Gangsters – Exit Left
It’s time for a clean sweep – this book is getting cluttered up with some of the dross of the underworld, so we need to get rid of them and allow a little more room for others of their ilk.
We’ll start with Johnny Rice, because the law had not quite finished with him. Less than twelve months after Spot’s acquittal, Rice appeared, once more at the Old Bailey, this time in the dock, and once more with Reggie Seaton prosecuting. Rice was found guilty of receiving stolen vehicle registration books and obtaining three books of petrol coupons by false pretences. In mitigation, his defence counsel stated that Rice was ‘in fear of his life’ from gangsters, especially one Billy Hill, whose name had been mentioned during the trial. The officer in the case, Detective Sergeant Vibart, when asked if he thought that Rice had been ‘largely used by others’, replied that he thought that was so, but added that he did not believe that Rice was a frightened man. Notching up his fifth conviction, Rice was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment, but even then he did not learn from his experiences: in 1962, once more at the Old Bailey, he was convicted of conspiracy relating to car registration books. He was one of five men found guilty (another was a Scotland Yard detective serg
eant), and his punishment was five years’ imprisonment.
As for Tommy Falco, he apparently clashed with the Kray Twins and was shot and wounded by them, following a dispute at the racetracks. He died some years later.
Victor Russo returned to Main Street, Coatbridge, Scotland, and died there in 1982.
Before he succumbed to cancer in 1971, Albert Dimes was said to have known the identity of the murderer in 1967 of ‘Scotch’ Jack Buggy, who had previously fallen out of favour with Billy Hill. In fact, Franny Daniels, confidant of both Hill and Spot, was one of two men acquitted of Buggy’s murder in 1974; Daniels died eighteen years later.
No one expected Jack Spot to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of his Soho empire and he did not disappoint them. He had not paid the damages owed to Duncan Webb and, as Jacob Colmore, he attended bankruptcy proceedings on 21 February 1957 in which he filed a statement of affairs showing liabilities of £1,321 and assets of £125.
The senior official receiver disproved much of what Spot had to say, to which Spot plaintively replied, ‘I have been beaten up to such an extent that I cannot give the correct answers. I have been beaten up terrible.’
Blaming Duncan Webb (who died the following year) for his misfortunes, Spot said, ‘I would have been better off if I went to prison for three years’, adding, histrionically, ‘Then I wouldn’t have been beaten up by twenty-five men.’
Less than a year later, he was granted his discharge from bankruptcy, subject to a suspension of six months, but not before he and Rita were evicted from their flat at Hyde Park Mansions, and Spot, wishing to visit his wife’s family in Canada, had been refused entry to the country. Rita opened the Highball Club in Bayswater which was first wrecked by a gang then set on fire, something which had been arranged by Reggie Kray, or so he said.