by Dick Kirby
It was a pity that Longman had mistreated Mrs Clements by knocking her about during their stormy relationship as common-law husband and wife; had he possessed even a modicum of common sense, he would have realized that that sort of behaviour often prompts a battered partner to give evidence against her bullying spouse.
When Richardson’s house was searched at the time of his arrest, a sum of money was found, also a cigarette packet with Charles North’s name written on it, as it was on a piece of paper with the word ‘wit’ (probably an abbreviation for ‘witness’). When he was charged, Richardson replied, ‘The charges are ridiculous and a frame-up.’ Longman, who probably realized he had said too much already, said nothing at all.
But the jury clearly did not believe that the charges were ‘ridiculous’ and after retiring for just over two hours found both men guilty. On 20 July 1967 Mr Justice O’Connor told Richardson, ‘You, Richardson, deliberately set your face against society and as a part of your activities you thought you could bend the administration of justice to fit your own creed’; he then sentenced him to twelve years’ imprisonment, to run concurrently with his twentyfive-year sentence. Describing Longman as ‘Richardson’s lapdog’, the judge sentenced him to eight years’ imprisonment.
It was all over. On the same day, charges were dropped against Richardson and Jean Goodman for making false statements to obtain passports, and Jean Goodman pleaded guilty to possessing sixteen Preludin tablets, a banned stimulant – she received an absolute discharge.
One month previously, on 20 June 1967, Berman, whose relationship with Charlie Richardson was described by Sebag Shaw as being that of ‘the man who rode on the back of a tiger’, changed his plea to one of guilty to demanding £1,200 with menaces from Taggart and also to causing actual bodily harm to a Michael O’Connor; since he had spent eleven months in custody awaiting trial, he was sentenced to a term of imprisonment to permit his immediate release. He also pleaded guilty to keeping 300 uncustomed watches and was fined £500; his pleas of not guilty to causing grievous bodily harm to both Taggart and O’Connor were accepted.
The following day, charges of conspiracy to cheat and defraud were dropped against Charlie Richardson, Jean Goodman, Johnnie Longman, Roy Hall, Brian Morse and Derek Brian Mottram.6 The same applied to charges of larceny and storebreaking in respect of Charlie Richardson, Brian Morse and James Henry Kensett.
In a different court, Judge Graham Rogers sentenced Jimmy Moody to a term of imprisonment to coincide with his immediate release for attacking the three police officers, since he had been in custody for fifteen months since the time of his arrest for the affray at Mr Smith’s Club.
And on 22 June appeals were lodged in respect of all those sentenced to imprisonment. This was expected of them, but it did them no good at all.
There was one other matter. Eddie Richardson’s finger had been firmly placed in a rather lucrative pie in 1964 when he helped cream off illicit takings of £100,000 per year, courtesy of a sophisticated fraud run between 1962 and 1966 at the London Airport car parks. Twelve men were convicted and on 11 December 1967 were sentenced to a total of thirty-two years’ imprisonment, with some being ordered to pay costs of £9,860.
However, Eddie Richardson was not among them. Neither was Frankie Fraser. There were two people with that surname who were acquitted, but not from the same family, I’m sure.
CHAPTER 19
Richardsons – the Aftermath
Charlie Richardson settled down to a disruptive life in prison. John McVicar described him as ‘unscrupulous, treacherous and ruthless’, and when he was unsurprisingly refused parole for the seventh time, having served fourteen years, he decided to escape and in 1980 did so, from an open prison. He was at large for seven months, but was arrested on his forty-seventh birthday in his brother’s porn shop.
Layton Williams interviewed him at Coldingley Prison in 1983 regarding the murder of a previously released inmate who had been on the same wing as Richardson. In fact, Williams interviewed the entire wing and found Richardson to be ‘polite and co-operative as he surely didn’t want to jeopardise his release date . . . the prison warder informed me that Richardson was expecting an officer of at least the rank of detective superintendent, as he considered himself of such important notoriety.’
It must have come as a crushing blow to Richardson’s ego to discover that he was being formally interviewed about a murder by an aid to CID.
Finally released in July 1984, Richardson remarried and had another child. He wrote his memoirs, My Manor, published in 1991 – his hatred and contempt for just about everyone spewed out of its pages. A heavy smoker all his life, he died of emphysema in September 2012.
*
Eddie Richardson was released in 1976, having served just over ten years. He opened a porn shop and then went back into the metal business.
He later opened a club named J. Arthur’s in Catford managed by Roy Hall, who had been released in 1972 and had suffered several heart attacks. There were reports of drug abuse around the premises as well as a series of assaults which culminated in January 1986 when a young man was stabbed to death. Fifteen people were present; all of them claimed to have seen nothing. Chief Superintendent John Taylor successfully applied for the club’s licence to be revoked.
Then, as Richardson would later say, ‘I made a mistake.’ This ‘mistake’ was being involved in the importation of two tonnes of cannabis, as well as 153 kilos of cocaine worth £43m to feed the habits of the country’s 475,000 cocaine users. The quantity recovered amounted to one-third of the United Kingdom’s total seizure of cocaine during 1989. At Winchester Crown Court in 1990 Eddie Richardson was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment.
In prison he made friends with Lord Longford and turned out to be an accomplished painter; he was released in 2001.
*
Frank Fraser had been sentenced to fifteen years; following his involvement in a prison riot, he was finally released after serving twenty. Following a hunger strike (‘People cheered and shook my hand’) he began to commit his usual catalogue of misbehaviour in prison, chucking pots of urine and excrement over prison governors and attacking warders; it seemed illogical that a man who had pulled every possible stroke to get himself acquitted did just about everything he could, once he was convicted, to prolong his stay behind bars. Martin Gosling, the senior probation officer at Norwich Prison when Fraser arrived, told me that he asked Fraser through the Judas flap of his cell door if anyone needed to be notified of his arrival. ‘He immediately leapt from his bunk’, Gosling recalled, ‘shouting, “Fuck off you sodding bastard”’ This outburst was accompanied by inaccurate spitting. ‘He came to Norwich again a year or two later and succeeded in evading the clutches of two prison officers while on a reception board; for some reason he attacked the prison padre who was present, ripping from his neck the crucifix that he wore.’
Following his release, Fraser was ‘amazed’ to be convicted of receiving stolen coins in 1987 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment – later reduced on appeal to two.
In 1991, as he was leaving a club named Turnmills in Clerkenwell, he was shot in the head; naturally, he claimed that undercover police were responsible.
Fraser was a man who had been flogged, moved over a hundred times whilst serving sentences – sometimes spending just two days and nights in any one prison – and had spent forty-two years of his life behind bars; all this he recounted in a couple of dire memoirs. When he was in his eighties and was asked in a television interview if it was true he had killed forty men, he replied, ‘Who am I to argue?’ He later twice threatened violence to the interviewer and the year before his death was handed an ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) for threatening a fellow resident at a care home. He died aged ninety in 2014.
My enduring memory of Frankie Fraser comes from a television documentary in which he leered at the camera and beseeched the viewers to believe that, ‘We woz rascals, weren’t we?’ Well, it’s a matter of o
pinion, isn’t it? If you accept that ‘rascal’ fits the description of an unrepentant, perjuring, violent, torturing thief who was completely out of control, then yes, he probably was.
*
Jimmy Moody was a rudderless ship following his release, with no Charlie Richardson to guide him. Within a year, he and his brother Dickie gate-crashed a party, and when a row developed about the music being turned down, a fight ensued which resulted in twenty-one-year-old William Day being kicked and his skull smashed in with bricks. The brothers were convicted of his manslaughter and each sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, with Jim Moody having a year added for attacking paedophile prisoners. He was later arrested for a series of armed robberies; whilst awaiting trial he escaped from Brixton Prison with the assistance of his brother Dickie, who was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment. But Jimmy Moody was never recaptured. He was on the run for thirteen years before finally being shot dead in an East End pub in 1993. It was rumoured that during the intervening years he had been a contract hit-man; no one has ever been convicted of his murder.
*
Henry Botton, the possessor of nine convictions, had only just been released from eight years’ preventative detention for breaking into a bank before his involvement in the Mr Smith’s Club affray; he was said to be a police informer. He was sixty-three years of age when eighteen-year-old Cornelius Burke, dressed as a police officer, tricked him into opening the front door of his house in Shooters Hill Road, Blackheath in July 1983. He then killed Botton with a shotgun helpfully supplied by Burke’s associate, William Clarkson; both men were sentenced to life imprisonment the following October.
*
Following her release, Jean Goodman married a painter and decorator. Jean La Grange visited Charlie Richardson, campaigned for his release for a while and later, it is believed, went back to South Africa and her husband.
As for the rest, Bernard Wajcenberg had several more scrapes with the law: in July 1980 the fifty-three-year-old fraudster was sentenced to thirty months’ imprisonment for his part in a £100,000 swindle. When he was arrested in Switzerland, his wife contacted John Simmonds to ask if his sentence could be served in England. However, Simmonds – who said to me, ‘Benny was best described as a likeable rogue’ – regretfully had to explain to Maria Wajcenberg that such an undertaking was beyond his jurisdiction. And Jack Duval? He was convicted of a £300,000 long firm fraud in 1972 and sent down for nine years.
*
So that was the story of the Richardsons and the Torture Trial. Gwyn Waters told me that Charlie Richardson had far more brains than the Kray twins but ‘whatever enterprise Richardson was concerned with, violence had to be involved’.
CHAPTER 20
The Krays – Revisited
When the Krays received word of the affray at Mr Smith’s Club they were delighted. They were not, of course, immediately apprised of the full facts but they were aware that the Richardson gang had been seriously disabled. Frankie Fraser had been shot, as had Ronald Jeffrey (both seriously), as well as Eddie Richardson; William Stayton had vanished – they were unaware that he had fled to Gibraltar but it mattered not, he was out of the way; Charlie Richardson had not been involved since he had been in South Africa; but for many of the gang, injured or not, with Dickie Hart dead there were charges pending.
Eddie Richardson and Fraser had had the fruit machines in the West End; they were now out of the running, so who was to stop the Krays making substantial inroads into the West End themselves? Albert Dimes? ‘Albert can’t fight for fuck’, the twins dismissively remarked, and in fairness, Dimes, now in his fifties, would have found the combination of Reg and Ron difficult to contend with. And the word was that the US mafia wanted the twins to arrange gambling junkets for them. So all this could have led to a very smooth, trouble-free takeover.
At least it would have done, until two nights after the Smith’s Club affray, when Ronnie Kray shot dead George Cornell at the Blind Beggar public house.
*
There had been bad blood between Ron and Cornell for some time. As a member of the Watney Streeters, Cornell – known then as George Myers – had fought with Ron and, unusually, Ron had come off worse. That was one, not unimportant matter; another was that there had been a confrontation between the two just prior to Christmas 1965, when Cornell had publicly referred to Ron as ‘a fat poof’. In addition, Cornell had told the brother of a nineteen-year-old boy that the reason Ron was taking the attractive young man to Newcastle was not, as he claimed, to further the lad’s boxing career, but for more salacious purposes. And lastly, and probably least importantly, Cornell ran porn shops in the West End which the twins wanted.
On the evening of 9 March 1966 John Dickson drove John Alexander ‘Scotch Ian’ Barrie and Ronnie Kray to the Blind Beggar pub in the Mile End Road, Stepney after one of Ronnie’s ‘boys’ had excitedly informed him, ‘Cornell’s in the Beggars’. Visiting the pub was, of course, a deliberately provocative act on Cornell’s part, because it was in the heart of Kray territory; but not only was Cornell unafraid of Ron, he was openly contemptuous of him. Macabrely, the jukebox was playing a popular song of the day, the Walker Brothers’ The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More, and for George Cornell, who was sitting at the bar, it didn’t. He had just time to sneer, ‘Well, look who’s here?’ as the two men entered the pub, before Barrie let off two shots to scatter and disorientate the customers, whereupon Ronnie Kray fired his Luger, hitting Cornell in the forehead. Cornell’s two companions – Albie Wood and Johnny Dale – fled, the barmaid ran into the cellar, other customers, including Michael Flannery, made themselves scarce; and as Cornell lay dying on the floor, Ron and Barrie nonchalantly strolled out of the pub, got into their waiting car and drove off.
The post-mortem was carried out at Westminster mortuary by Professor Cedric Keith Simpson CBE, FRCP, FRCPath; removing a single bullet from Cornell’s head, he deduced that due to the absence of powder marks, the shot had been fired from a few feet away.
Although Ron needed no justification to commit a murder he would later say that it was in revenge for the killing of Dickie Hart who, he claimed, was a cousin; and since it appeared that Hart had been dispatched by a rival firm of which Cornell was a member even though he had not been present at the murder, that was reason enough.
By the following morning every man and his dog in the East End knew about Cornell’s killing and, more importantly, who was responsible. Tommy Butler was detached from his duties as head of the Flying Squad to investigate what was, on the face of it, a straightforward murder carried out in full view of any number of witnesses and to solve it in no time at all.
But he didn’t. No one was talking. No one had seen anything. And when Ronnie Kray was put up for identification, no one picked him out. No one, apparently, knew anything – with the possible exception of Gerald McArthur. John Simmonds told me:
On the night of the Blind Beggar shooting, Mr Mac had info that something big was coming down with the Krays and the Richardsons. He deployed DS Don Jones and myself to keep obs on the Britannia public house which was in the back streets of Whitechapel. We had a 5 RCS radio so we couldn’t listen in or speak to the Met. We heard a lot of police and ambulance activity but the Britannia was dead quiet. Only when we heard the news on the BBC did we realize we had been at the wrong location – perhaps fortunately!
The fact that no one had spoken was beyond the twins’ wildest dreams. They left the country – nobody tried to stop them – and flew to Morocco, where they met up with Billy Hill (who by now was privately describing the twins as, ‘brainless cunts’). Reg was followed by Christine, a hostess from London, whilst Ron sought the attentions of any available ‘brown boy’ in Tangiers.
Then they returned home – and still nobody was saying anything.
Perhaps someone was doing something, however. Apparently, two days after the murder, two unknown men called at the flat of Cornell’s elder brother James at Welstead House, Cannon Street Road, Ste
pney and handed him a parcel containing a revolver and twelve rounds of ammunition, telling him, ‘You might need this’. At least, that was the story about its possession given to the bench at Thames Magistrates’ Court on 6 August 1966. It appeared that Cornell did not need it and he was fined £50.
*
The twins had always treated the police with contempt (‘Coppers is dirt’) but nevertheless, they did on occasion try to ingratiate themselves with the force. Mike Warburton recounted the story of how the detective chief inspector from Limehouse and his men were having a drink in The Blue Posts in West India Dock Road when the Krays and some of their followers entered the pub. One of the camp followers sidled over and said, ‘Mr Kray sends his compliments and asks if you’d care to have a drink with him?’
To this, the DCI – a rather tough character – replied, ‘Please tell Mr Kray, thank you. On this one occasion, I’ll have a whisky and soda with him . . . but please also tell him that if he ever sets foot on my manor again, it’ll be the worse for him.’
In those days, CID officers were just as territorially inclined as the brothers Kray!
Nevertheless, they still used corrupt members of the Force for their own ends. One such was a bent detective sergeant who, it was said, demanded a sum of money from Ronnie – £20 per week, £50 per week or a flat, one-off payment of £50, it matters not – for unrestricted use of an East End pub. Unable to resist scoring off the hated police, Ron recorded an incriminating conversation with the cop on a concealed tape recorder and then handed it into the Yard. It appeared, however, that Ronnie had not grasped that in doing so he would be required to give evidence at the cop’s forthcoming trial; when a witness summons was issued, he promptly went into hiding, and after a retrial in Ron’s absence the cop was acquitted.