Britain's Most Notorious Prisoners

by Stephen Wade

  In terms of Noel Smith’s real importance today – as a writer – it has to be said that despite the massive efforts of people such as Julian Broadhead, who has published and supported prison writing, the Waterside Press, which used to publish anthologies of creative writing from prison, and of Inside Time, there are still many hurdles blocking the path to success for the prisoner who wants to make a career as a writer. Many people inside find their writing talents working for the in-house prison magazine, or in writing poetry for other inmates, as Noel Smith did. But when it comes to taking that step from amateur to professional, the support and permission are just not there.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Krays Inside

  I want you to get a little team together and have a go at the Krays’. That was what Leonard Reed was told by his superior officer in 1964. He had been involved in the hunt for the Great Train robbers and when he started to try to work on the Kray case he was not exactly sanguine in his hopes of a breakthrough. So many people linked with their protection rackets and other schemes were afraid to talk to the law, naturally. But he selected the men who were to make up his squad and set up camp at Tintagel House. Nothing could really be kept from the Krays if it was happening in London and they knew about him. The link in the chain of potential informants broke when Leslie Payne talked to the detectives and from that moment Read had a chance of success. It was all down to the assembling of the right men, on Read’s part.

  That was Nipper Read’s fundamental skill: he knew people and assessed character very acutely. The Krays had stepped up to murder and Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie had disappeared. There were suspicions of course, but the Krays escaped from the heat for a while, holidaying in Cambridge and Suffolk. It was then that Read was busy.

  Read was a short man but he was strong and athletic; like the Krays, he was a useful boxer, and he had acquired that nickname of ‘Nipper’ in his early fighting days. He was only five feet seven but personality was his virtue and he had charisma. Promoted to Detective Superintendent, he set to work. He had found quick promotions in the Metropolitan Police and he was one of the youngest men to hold a senior position. But there were considerable obstacles in the Kray case. First, there was no evident collation of information about their criminal network; the men he chose were picked for specific talents. John de Rose was Head of the Murder Squad and Frank Cater was chosen as Nipper’s assistant. He set a target of three months to clear up the case.

  The main elements in the operation were to be to help the essential unobtrusiveness by varying routes when at work; put a stress on the security of the team members and to explore the long trail of pain and devastation they had left in the lives of their victims in past years. Read sorted through the people in that history and ended with a list of thirty – his ‘delightful index’ as he called it. Read expressed the beginnings of this unique challenge in his memoirs: ‘This is what always appalled me when I first started the enquiry. You’d talk to the CID officers and they’d say, “Oh this is down to the Krays” and you’d say, “Well what are you doing about it?” And the answer was they were doing nothing about it.’

  As those involved were gradually interviewed, Read selected the best potential witnesses from his list, men like Sidney Vaughan, but his first arrest brought no one to testify and in fact stirred some of the Kray allies in the higher echelons, men like Lord Boothby, who had denied any relationship with the brothers in the press, other than ‘business’ relationships. But at that first arrest, he spoke in the House of Lords, expressing indignation at the apparent detention without trial that was suspected. The trial was a mess and ended in the frustration of a set retrial. Read would have to work hard to get it right the next time.

  The Krays thought they had won and went home to celebrate, but Read gave himself six months to be prepared for round two. The break came with Leslie Payne, who knew about the murder of McVitie and thought he was most likely to be next in line. Read had him protected by installing him in a hotel in Marylebone, and let him write a long statement of his knowledge of events around the Krays’ ‘business’. Read saw a lot of men personally, and many faded away, not interested in helping. But Payne was a key figure and here was huge success at last. Payne fitted into the Krays’ empire as the financial brain. Read explained his role: ‘He was the man who had made fortunes for the twins by setting up cells of Long Firm frauds. He was far more intelligent than most of those I saw, but I had to remember he was the most experienced, even brilliant, con-man.’

  Payne admitted that it was the escalation of violence in the Krays that had turned him against them. Read met Payne several times and moved easily and sensitively towards having him on the side of law. The turning point was Read’s question about whether Payne knew about ‘The List’. That was the kitlist Ronnie had of those destined to be ‘topped’. The way the twins worked in that context made sense to both men – after all McVitie had died because he kept Kray money given to him in payment for a job – a job he did not do. Read took a 164-page statement from Payne, sitting in a police section house in Marylebone.

  Read then steadily gathered other witnesses, including Freddy Gore, and he was at pains to assure each person he approached that he would not be isolated, ‘on a limb’ as he testified. Such actions as wire-tapping then gave Read knowledge of some of the jobs effected by the twins up in Glasgow and elsewhere. He began to understand the extent of the web of criminality he was dealing with.

  When ready to swoop, Read, with characteristic caution and preparation, held a pre-arrest briefing. He had to protect witnesses at the same time as he moved in, as there were so many unknown components in the Kray empire and no total trust in anyone who had spoken to him. He had cells prepared at West End Central Police Station; he checked with his surveillance teams, and then followed them back to their council flat in Shoreditch. The usual practice of an early approach, as suspects were off-guard, did the trick. Ronnie was in bed with a young boy and Reggie was with a girl. The arrest was low-key:

  When I told Ronnie he was being arrested he said, ‘Yes all right Mr Read, but I’ve got to have my pills, you know that.’ He was referring to his supply of Stematol which kept him on an even mental keel. When Frank Cater told him he could not have them he pleaded with me and asked me to bring a letter from his psychiatrist which said he had to take two a day.

  After that it was a case of tracking down the minor players. The triumph was Read’s and this time he had witnesses in place, dependable and protected.

  At the trial, Justice Melford Stevenson completed the process of justice: Ron went down for murdering Cornell and Reg for killing McVitie. The jury took six hours and fifty-four minutes to decide their guilt. Stevenson was the judge who sent the Krays to prison on thirty-year stretches. They were both defiant regarding Read, saying that he and other officers came to try to ‘put the frighteners on them’ and that they told him to ‘fuck off’. Read’s long and careful investigation had proved that the attitudes prevailing which accepted some powerful gangs as unassailable were defeatist and that they were in fact denying police work and taking the concept of professionalism down several pegs. He had the prise as well as the determination to take on the most powerful outfit in London and indeed beyond the city, as he gradually learned as the truth about the Kray empire was revealed.

  According to some commentators, Read had also had to fight the ‘mandarins on the fifth floor’ at the Yard. Read was aware of some officers who had applied misguided loyalty to the wrong men. That footnote to his career only serves to increase the opinion that he was a ‘reader of men’ before he was anything else as a policeman. Clearly, Read was one of those detectives who had to work with total integrity in all contexts, as in the story of his being involved in a raid on a bookmakers in Albany Street when the phone rang and it was the voice of a fellow detective wanting to put a bet on. Tactfully and professionally, Read said, ‘Sorry Sid, not today.’

  Simply to say the word ‘Krays’ is to invite stock respon
ses about them and their reputation. The public image is full of paradoxes and contradictions. The huge library of publications and films about their criminal careers offers the reader a complex assortment of puzzling suggestions about who they were and what they did. Some photos show them at ease with showbiz celebrities such as Barbara Windsor, Victor Spinetti and their pin-up gangster hero, Hollywood actor, George Raft. Others depict two bruisers, blocks of muscle who would be ideal frighteners and doormen. These images do indicate the paths their lives took, from young boxers through to long-term cons.

  My main focus here is on the prisons stretches, as there is so much that is easily available on the crime elsewhere in print. For Ronnie Kray, his life ended just after a last visit to hospital. One August Sunday in 1995, at the Heatherwood Hospital in Ascot, the medical registrar got a call from Broadmoor. The prison doctor told him that one of the prisoners had collapsed and had low blood pressure. There were no other obvious signs, but he had a long cardiac history and a Dr Blackwood was treating him for angina. The patient was Ronnie Kray.

  The doctor arranged for a transfer to casualty at Heatherwood for an assessment, and Ron came in, cuffed and flanked, as the doctor told me, ‘by two enormous prison guards’. The doctor at the time had no idea who the prisoner was, although the nurses did. The doctor recalled when I interviewed him, ‘He cut a really pathetic, forlorn figure, yellow fingers from smoking, short, about my height … and had a drug card as long as the Declaration of Independence which was a who’s who of psychotropics … [drugs affecting the central nervous system and causing changes in perception and behaviour] and he was completely and utterly compliant. He had a basic assessment (ECG, bloods and so on). His blood pressure was low … his HB came in as just slightly low … let’s say around 11.5 with normal range for males being 12.5 to 16.5. He had a slowish pulse which I attributed maybe to the drugs he was on, but to make sure I wasn’t missing anything I also did a digital rectal examination, which was normal. So about an hour later I sent him back, suggesting observation and adjustment of his medication.’

  The doctor continued: ‘Later I got a call from the same prison doctor saying that Ronnie had collapsed again he was really not happy to see him kept in jail under those circumstances. That’s when I learned that Ronnie had had some blood tests not long before and then his HB had been quite high – perhaps around 15 or 16, which is typical of a smoker). Knowing the normal value for Ronnie meant that the blood test I had done was actually quite abnormal for him because he was missing four grams or four pints of blood. I admitted him immediately. ‘Ronnie, who had been judged to be criminally insane and so sent to Broadmoor, was at that time in the same ward as Peter Sutcliffe, and he had been smoking over a hundred cigarettes a day. Doctors had told him that such a habit would kill him, and he had written a letter to Reg which made his brother become convinced that Ron had given up on their shared dreams of one day living abroad.

  The doctor explained that Ronnie was most likely bleeding internally, and perhaps had an ulcer; he was then given some fluids and transferred to Wexham Park Hospital in Slough. There they had full endoscopic facilities and other specialities. During recovery, though, Ron had a heart attack and died.

  Reg was in Maidstone prison when he heard of his brother’s death. He heard it on the radio and was, as the first report said, ‘absolutely distraught’. Reg was to die in October 2000, given his release as a dying wish. He had terminal cancer and had been given a few weeks to live. The letter Ron had written to him had these words:

  Dear Reg,

  I have reason to believe I will never get out.

  I feel a bit sad tonight, as much as I have resigned myself to the fact that I won’t be getting out. I would have loved to have come to India, China and all the other beautiful countries. But I hope you will visit all these places, as that will compensate me, if you go instead …

  The road to those two deaths had started when they were both convicted at the Old Bailey on 5 March 1969 after a trial that lasted for forty days. Ron was found guilty of the murder of two men, Cornell and Jack McVitie, and Reg was an accessory after the fact in the case of both murders. Charles Kray, along with Frank Fraser, were accessories after the fact of the McVitie murder. The twins were given life imprisonment.

  There was an appeal hearing in July 1969 on the basis of legal procedure. It was groping at straws, really, the issue being whether or not two charges of murder were proper in one indictment. The trial first held was not open to objection, either, and the reason given by the appeal judges, headed by Lord Justice Widgery, is interesting with regard to how the usual Kray methods of bullying and intimidation had failed them:

  Held, further, that the joint trial was not open to objection by reason of the fact that a co-defendant (who was acquitted) in laying the foundation of a defence of duress exercised on him by the leaders of the gang, held in the course of the trial given evidence of threats and acts of violence by the leaders of the gang and their supporters, which was relevant and admissible on the issue of duress.

  In other words, the Krays had no way out; a life in prison awaited them. The bullying had not worked this time. As far as Reg was concerned, the prison life was manageable, as he said himself in the book the Krays did with Fred Dineage: ‘It’s because of my own attitude to prison life, because of my mental approach to my problems, because of my friends, my hobbies and my fanaticism for physical fitness that I have not been sent insane.’ He thought that the authorities wanted him to crack, to lose mental strength, so they could ‘send me to a madhouse for ever’.

  The murder of Cornell was centre stage in the court discussion. The appeal court report summed up the story: ‘On the evening of March 9, 1966, the twin brothers Ronald and Reginald were drinking with a number of their associates in a public house called The Lion, from which Ronald Kray and the applicant Barrie drove to another public house nearby called the Blind Beggar where, according to the barmaid, Ronald shot Cornell in cold blood whilst the latter was drinking with others in the bar … Ronald Kray and Barrie returned to The Lion, whereupon several witnesses spoke of an immediate exodus of the Kray twins …’ Forever after that, in the Kray story, the witnesses were branded ‘Traitors’. The Kray story had been that, in the words of the appeal court summary, ‘… they had been drinking at The Lion and that they had later gone to the Chequers Inn at Walthamstow, but explained that they did this on hearing that the murder had been committed and for fear of being suspected of complicity.’

  The judge was in no mood to listen to discussion about the minutiae of procedure. He said, replying to the claim that felonies and misdemeanours may be joined in the same indictment, or that a series of offences could not be lumped together, ‘The court does not accept either of these arguments.’ That was his plain and simple answer.

  Reg’s accounts of prison life cover a wide span of characters and experiences, including his time with Harry Roberts in Gartree, when he recalled that Roberts was scared of the sight of blood. Reg wrote: ‘Hate ’Em All Harry they used to call him and I believe he killed three coppers without a hint of remorse. Yet I saw him scream and nearly faint one day when he cut his finger on a knife he was using to cut up his meat… He told me he couldn’t stand the sight of blood’ Reg recalled to Dineage.

  When they were sentenced, they were split up: Ron went to Durham and Reg to Parkhurst. Despite a campaign to get them put together, they never were; for Reg the survival skill was mainly exercise, but he also painted. For Ron, the solace in Broadmoor was poetry. Ron told Fred Dineage that he was all right ‘as long as he had his drugs’. He had to have injections of Modicate for his schizophrenia; he explained that he imagined people were plotting against him if he was without drugs. He said, ‘It’s a terrible feeling and it’s the only time I feel out of control, like some devil has got inside my brain and is pulling it apart with his bare hands. But the drugs make everything feel fine.’

  As for their creativity, it was therapeutic. Poetry in prison is
almost always rhymed, with insistent rhythms, and often deals directly with the mainstream themes of remorse, coping, loved ones and dreams of freedom. For Ron, it could be, as for so many, a retrospective exercise, as when he wrote a poem about a blind friend he had when he was young, and these lines are typical: ‘He could see no more, but the memory/of his friend’s faces he would have in store/God was his guide; and, he knew that He/would show him the way he had never lied.’

  Painting is very popular in prison workshops and classes. Every year artists compete for the prestigious Koestler Awards. When the new Home Office was set up in 2007, an artist from one jail had a watercolour hung on the walls there. To spend time in a prison art class and scan the walls of products is a wonderful experience. The works are sold for charity in many cases, and the entries for awards are always celebrated in the press and in prison publications. Reg Kray’s work came from early in his life; amazingly, he was given tips and advice, when he was younger, by the great artists, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The aspect of Reg’s work which created most impact in the media was his charity sales in aid of the Addenbrookes Children’s Liver Transplant Fund. Prisoners joined in with Reg, and at an auction, in Cambridge, a sales auction took place, with the title of Rogue’s Gallery, and the profits were very considerable.

  In July 2008, eight paintings by Ronnie Kray, who also dabbled, were sold for £16,500, painted when he was in Parkhurst. His details and prison number were on the reverse of the paintings, which were in oil, and on card. Their work was often used for barter inside, and one curious story is of oil paintings which were won in a card game and sold at auction in West Chiswick, and the pictures of a river and green valley were sold for £2,000. A spokesman for the auction company told reporters, ‘Reggie always painted with a dark sky. This might reflect his state of mind and the dark thoughts he had. He was known for his moods and for being aloof. Ronnie, on the other hand, always painted a white cottage because that was his idea of a dream, a place in the country.’