Wannabe in My Gang?

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  The Basildon bouncers were now learning this valuable lesson. Those who escaped tutorial in the main hall were captured in the car park and given the most brutal of lessons. They were beaten and their flesh torn open with Stanley knives. One blood-soaked bouncer was thrown into a lake. It was a miracle nobody died. Many of those who avoided hospital immediately ‘retired’ from the security industry, declaring almost comically, ‘Fings ain’t what they used to be.’ They were, of course, quite right: things had changed. Lager louts with bad attitudes had been replaced by smartly dressed, drug-fuelled, knife-wielding villains. Commuting to Essex from the East End of London, these villains wanted to flood the county with the ‘love drug’ Ecstasy. Disco versus rave; bouncer versus firm member; pints versus pills; they were all on a collision course and I was stepping into the epicentre without realising it.

  I thanked Dave for helping me out and told him that I would start work the following weekend. After securing additional income and the event for James going so well, I thought things were certainly looking up for me. I still had the incident with the police in Wolverhampton to sort out, but it was hardly a hanging offence.

  Over the next few days, calls from Ronnie and Reggie were fast and furious. They shouted at me and demanded that the funds be handed over to the Fallon family. I was in total agreement, but told them that I could not find the two men who actually had the money. Promise after promise followed, meeting after meeting took place, but the money never did materialise. Ronnie accepted what I had to say, but Reggie would not. He was constantly on the telephone. ‘You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that and you’ve got to hand that money over.’

  I kept telling him that I hadn’t got the fucking money, that Campbell and Brazier had the money. It just got sillier and sillier.

  I could offer no explanation other than the fact that I could not contact the two men or locate the money. Kate Kray joined in the barrage of phone calls, ringing me to tell me what Ronnie had told me five minutes earlier and what Reggie had told me ten minutes before that. Reggie Kray eventually informed me that Tony Lambrianou had been appointed to sort out the problem. He was to find out where the missing money had gone and arrange for it to be given to the Fallons. A meeting was arranged at a pub in Gants Hill, Essex. Campbell, myself, Lambrianou and one or two other people I had never met before attended. When asked about the proceeds from the boxing event, Campbell said most of it had gone on expenses. ‘Bollocks. Count the people on Tony’s table alone,’ I said, ‘12 at £40 a head, that’s £480 – plus whatever they bid for auction items.’

  ‘But Tony and people like that didn’t pay, Bernie,’ Campbell replied. ‘You can’t expect them to, they are on the Kray firm.’

  It dawned on me: Charlie Kray’s table was on the Kray firm, as was Kate Kray’s table and no doubt Campbell’s and Brazier’s. They had used the money genuine people, including myself, had paid to supplement themselves. I went fucking mad and walked out.

  When Reg telephoned me to find out how the meeting had gone, I told him exactly what had happened. ‘Those bastards have stolen money from a dead child and I want it. If I don’t get it, I am going to bash them.’

  Reg said that money would be given to the Fallons. ‘A couple of grand,’ he said, ‘but we want you to forget this, Bernie, as Ron and I don’t want any bad publicity surrounding ourselves and a kid’s charity.’ Reg also wanted to forget he had pledged all the proceeds from Slang to James. No doubt he thought that now that James had died, his parents’ problems were over. It did make me wonder if the Fallons would still consider Reg ‘a saint’ now.

  When Ronnie heard what had happened, he insisted that Lambrianou should pay for his table. ‘He isn’t one of us,’ he said, ‘make sure he pays, but as for the rest of it, we are never going to get the money now so do as Reg asks, accept the money he’s offered and let it end there.’

  Why Ron had singled Lambrianou out, I didn’t know. I did know that I was never going to be able to recoup the Fallons’ money. A week later, I was told Campbell had given ‘some money’ to Kate Kray, which I was told had been passed on to the Fallon family. The subject was never again discussed with the Krays in my presence.

  It came as no surprise when I read in the Sunday People some time later that one of the ‘promoters’ involved in the charity boxing event for James Fallon had been involved in another charity scam. In a weekly feature entitled ‘Rat of the Week’ the following story appeared:

  STARS GET CONNED BY CHARITY CHEAT

  Heartless taxi boss Dave Brazier took the dying for a ride when he pocketed the proceeds of a charity football match. He organised the game between a celebrity 11 and his own firm to raise funds for a local hospice, but his cheque for the celebrities’ expenses bounced and he never passed on a penny of the money raised.

  He still owes hundreds of pounds to the people who helped publicise the event in aid of the Saint Frances Hospice at Romford, Essex. Hugh Elton, manager of the celebrity side which included boxer Terry Marsh and actors Glen Murphy and Ray Winstone said: ‘This leaves a really bad taste. I have been involved in charity matches for 30 years and this is only the second time it has happened. We agreed to play the match because it was a very worthy cause. We didn’t charge a fee, only expenses for the players who came from all over the country.

  ‘Normally these are paid after the game but Mr Brazier gave me a cheque for the £450 bill, which bounced, and despite numerous promises, including a new cheque in the post, he has not paid a thing. I understand he has failed to pass on anything to the hospice. It’s a rotten situation.’ One of those who attended the match last August added: ‘there were at least 200 people who each paid a couple of quid entrance money.

  ‘After the match, there was a disco and a raffle in the club house, which raised even more cash, and before the game, collection boxes for the hospice were taken around the town. Even the Kray twins sent an autographed copy of their book and they won’t be very pleased to learn that a charity has been ripped off.’

  Hospice boss Harry Packham said: ‘We are most concerned for the good name of the hospice which relies on public donations to raise the annual £2 million needed to run our 22 beds. We did receive a disappointing £49 from a total of 30 collection boxes, but we received nothing from the match itself. I am also very sorry that the celebrity 11 have not been reimbursed for their expenses.’

  At his home nearby, Dave Brazier claimed that he himself had lost thousands over the match, but when asked to give detailed accounts of the losses his sums didn’t add up and he couldn’t explain why the hospice did not receive a penny from the hundreds of pounds in cash taken at the event.

  It sounded painfully familiar to me. The same promoter was at the helm and the same infamous villains had backed him by donating items to raise money. If they were not in on the scam, they wouldn’t have had anything else to do with Brazier after the Fallon fiasco. Ron and Reg were eager for the press and public to know that they were not happy about dying children being ripped off, but despite their position as ‘kings of the underworld’ and champions of a code of conduct men had allegedly died for breaking, I was more than certain that the Essex cabbie who had committed this despicable act had little or nothing to worry about.

  3

  GANGSTARS’ PARADISE

  I had often wondered how my life would end, but I had never imagined anything quite so violent as this. I was staring death in the face and there was nothing I could do. The snarling man in front of me had a hammer and a previous conviction for a gruesome murder.

  I was in the front room of Tony Lambrianou’s flat with Alan Smith, the Scotsman I had met at the boxing show. Alan had travelled down to London from Edinburgh that day to visit Ronnie Kray and to meet me for a drink.

  Half an hour earlier, Alan and I had received a telephone call from Tony Lambrianou, who had invited us to his home. In the ’60s, Tony and his brother Chris had lured Jack McVitie to a flat where the Krays had then murdered him. Looking
back, I realise I had been foolish to accept Tony’s invitation to visit his home.

  It was Tony Lambrianou who stood before me now, threatening to ‘smash a hammer through your head’ and shouting, ‘I’ll kill you.’ Alan and I had called around to see Tony earlier that day, but he wasn’t in. According to Tony, his wife had told Alan and me he was out, but we had refused to accept the fact. We were then said to have insisted that Tony was home and we had become abusive. Alan and I were now going to pay for our stupidity.

  As Tony raised the hammer, which would surely extinguish my life, I instinctively threw my hands up to protect my face. Bang! Bang! I screamed out in pain as my fists struck the headboard behind my bed.

  Sitting up and nursing my grazed knuckles, I realised with relief I had been having a rather silly dream. Lambrianou must have had a similar silly dream because in his book Getting It Straight (2001) he describes to Freddie Foreman, his co-author, threatening Alan and me in much the same manner. The only significant difference between my version of events and Tony’s is that he seems to believe that the attack actually happened. Like so many stories and people associated with the Kray myth, the incidents and non-events they describe have been fleshed out and exaggerated to inflate the egos and reputations of those involved or those who say they were involved.

  The truth of the matter is, Ronnie Kray had asked me to visit Tony Lambrianou at his flat, which was on the upper floor of a rundown council block at the Elephant and Castle in south-east London. I had met Tony several times on visits with Ronnie after he had been asked to resolve the mystery of the missing money from the boxing show. He had not seen Ronnie for years and they appeared to get on well, but I sensed something was not quite right because of the way Ronnie talked about Lambrianou to other people. In 1988 Ronnie and his brother Reg published Our Story in which they admitted for the first time their involvement in the murders of George Cornell and Jack McVitie.

  Lambrianou must have thought that the Krays’ public admissions would give him the opportunity to cash in on his own story. Not long after Reg and Ron’s book, Lambrianou published his first book, Inside the Firm (1991), in which he described himself on the front cover as ‘a former Kray gang boss’. When Ronnie Kray saw the book he was livid. Tony had written:

  Up until the time that Reggie Kray admitted his part in the murder of Jack the Hat McVitie, every loyal one of us held our silence over the events of a unique era in British crime. Now perhaps it’s time for a member of the firm to have a say. For years we’ve been hearing what everybody else has had to say about us, in courtrooms, books and newspapers, and the twins have taken their chance to reply in print. I intend, with this book, to set the record straight for all of us who stood together in the dock and went to prison for our crimes.

  Ronnie told me that Tony was a liar, had not held his silence and was no Kray gang boss. ‘Lambrianou and his brother grassed us up and Tony was no member of our firm.’ Leaning over the visiting-room table in Broadmoor, Ron whispered, ‘I want you to get Lambrianou and jump up and down on his ribs until every single one of them is broken and he has no wind left in him.’

  I tried explaining to Ronnie that somebody who had served 15 years for a crime that he and his brother had committed deserved to make a few quid out of their story. I attempted to reason with Ronnie: ‘You and Reg have admitted the murders yourselves in your own book, so he isn’t doing any harm, is he?’

  Ronnie sneered and said that Lambrianou was a snivelling grass and had not kept quiet, as he was claiming. ‘Lambrianou is saying that he had kept his mouth shut and should therefore be shown some respect, but that is total shit,’ Ronnie said. ‘Tony Lambrianou and his brother Chris made statements against me and my brother in an effort to save themselves. I will show you the paperwork.’ Ronnie was prone to making false allegations when he fell out with someone or he thought that people were conspiring against him.

  He would often have a go at me, not threatening to kill me or anything, just asking why I was talking to such-and-such a person and asking what had been said. Had they mentioned Ron and did I trust them? He often talked about killing other people who had displeased him or who he thought had been talking badly of him, but in actual fact the person concerned had done no wrong. Ron was, more often than not, suffering from a bout of his paranoid schizophrenia.

  I couldn’t see how Tony could be guilty as charged by Ron, so I thought I would go and warn him about what was being said. If I wasn’t prepared to carry out Ron’s will, I was 100 per cent sure that one of the Kray hangers-on would, just to get into Ronnie’s good books.

  The Kray gang had stood trial 20 years ago. Tony, since then, had been mentioned in numerous newspaper articles and books and had always been portrayed as a man who was loyal to the twins. If he had informed on them, as Ronnie claimed, I was certain that after 20 years the facts would have come out before. Whichever way I looked at it, I just couldn’t believe what Ronnie was saying.

  When we arrived at Lambrianou’s flat, I admit Alan and I had taken a drink but we certainly were not drunk. Tony’s wife, Wendy, had answered the door and told us that he was out. I thought that he might be avoiding coming to the door because he had heard about Ronnie’s ranting. Most ‘jobs’ in the Kray camp were given to many instead of one. Ronnie had probably asked numerous people to confront Tony and so I wouldn’t have been surprised if he was aware of Ron’s displeasure.

  If I was right about Ronnie just being paranoid, I wanted Tony to know that despite the rumours, he had nothing to be concerned about because I was sure Ronnie would calm down and see sense at some stage.

  I told Wendy that there was no need for Tony to pretend he wasn’t in and this seemed to upset her. I can see why it would as I hadn’t explained that I was there with good intentions and she could have taken it as some sort of insult or veiled threat.

  From there on in, it was all downhill. Wendy asked us to leave, so I gave her my mobile-phone number and asked her to ask Tony to call me. Alan and I then walked away. Later that afternoon Tony did call and asked if we would go to his flat. When we arrived Tony said that he didn’t think it was right that Alan and I had turned up at his home earlier after taking a drink.

  I agreed, but explained that Alan had come down from Edinburgh that morning. ‘We had gone for a drink and after discussing what Ronnie had asked me to do, we decided to warn you before somebody else did Ron’s dirty work.’ Tony’s mood changed at once and the conversation turned to Ronnie’s paranoia and how it would all blow over. I told Tony I would keep him informed about what was going on.

  He thanked me and that was the end of the matter. No threats were made and no hammer was brandished, in spite of what Tony claimed in his book. In fact, Tony had posed for a photo with Alan. At the next visit, Ronnie asked me what had happened regarding Lambrianou. I told Ronnie that I had gone around to his flat but he wasn’t in. Ronnie seemed disappointed, but said that he had found out Lambrianou was holding a book launch in Epping and he was going to get him ‘pulled’ there. I mentioned this to Lambrianou and he immediately cancelled that particular event.

  I saw Ronnie a couple of weeks later and I thought that he would have calmed down, but I was wrong. Tony had appeared in the News of the World claiming McVitie, whose body has never been found, was buried in a grave 50 miles from London.

  Jack and his hat were dumped into the grave. Then his body was covered by a layer of soil. The next day an unsuspecting funeral procession pulled up at the graveside and a service was held. As the coffin was lowered into the grave, no one noticed that the hole was not quite as deep as it had been the day before.

  Tony had not mentioned any of this in his book and Ron said Lambrianou was now making up stories to make money, stories that, he said, could damage Reggie’s chances of parole. I had never seen Ronnie so annoyed. He kept saying that Lambrianou was a ‘lackey’ and a ‘grass’. He said he was never in the fucking firm and he was a liar. I found this very hard to believe because Lambrianou’s
book claimed that he was a ‘boss’ in the Krays’ firm and he and his brother had served 15 years because they had refused to tell police the truth about the McVitie murder.

  If Tony had, as Ronnie claimed, grassed them up, then it was inconceivable that he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment and served 15 years. The judge would surely have shown Tony leniency for assisting the prosecution’s case against the Kray brothers. What Ronnie was claiming just did not add up, but when Tony and his brother’s statements were shown to me, I could not believe what I was reading.

  In his book, Tony said that Reggie Kray had told him to invite McVitie to a party. ‘It was on Saturday night at a basement flat belonging to a girl called Blonde Carol in Stoke Newington, North London,’ says Lambrianou. ‘I knew there was a chance of him copping a right hander but I didn’t know someone had taken a gun.’

  Lambrianou and his brother Chris, plus two brothers called Mills accompanied McVitie to the party. Waiting for McVitie were Reggie and Ronnie Kray, gangsters Ronnie Hart and Ronald Bender and two of Ronnie Kray’s young homosexual boyfriends called Terry and Trevor. Lambrianou says:

  Ronnie pushed past me and did Jack right underneath the eye with a glass, ‘I’ve had enough of you,’ he said, ‘keep your mouth shut.’ Next thing Reggie was on him. This was the first time I had seen the gun. He tried to shoot him in the back of the head and I jumped, expecting an explosion but the gun wouldn’t work. As soon as Reggie pulled the gun I realised it had gone too far. My brother Chris and I had unwittingly set up Jack by taking him to Blonde Carol’s so now it was our row too. Jack would come back to us. When the gun failed to go off I said to Chris ‘Go and get one of ours.’ I knew we might have to do him ourselves. Chris went to our house to fetch a Smith and Wesson .38 police special.