by John Pearson
‘You know who I met the other night?’ said Reggie Kray to a small man with a squint, after losing a game of snooker to him at the billiard hall. The man was a successful fence from Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Old so-and-so from Islington, asking if I wanted ten thousand quid’s worth of forged fivers. Just shows how barmy people are. What could I do with all them snide fivers? Even if I could afford ’em, which I can’t.’
‘Some people’s like that, Reg. How much he want for ’em?’
‘Yeah. A right bloody nutter. Thirty bob I think.’
‘Thirty bob for a snide fiver? You do pick ’em, Reg boy. I’ll say that for you. What’re they like?’
‘Looked fine to me. But as you know that’s not my game, and he said he was selling the lot. Three thousand quid, take it or leave it. Must think I’m rolling in it.’
‘He’s off his chump, Reg. Stark staring. Still, there’s one born every minute.’
They played another game of snooker, had a drink, and the man went back to Shepherd’s Bush. Two days later, Reggie received an inquiry about forged £5 notes. It came from a friend of a friend who wanted Reggie to meet a man with a maroon Rover in a pub in Dalston. The man was brisk, well-spoken and wore a neatly trimmed moustache. After a couple of drinks he said he might be interested in some goods that Reggie had for sale. Reggie was non-committal. He said the goods weren’t his, and he wasn’t particularly interested in the idea.
The man became more enthusiastic. If these were quality goods, he would be very keen; naturally he’d have to see them first. Reggie said so would he. Finally they arranged to meet again the next night at the Terminus Café in Mile End Road. Reggie would bring the man with the goods; if they both liked his work they would split the lot between them. Reggie would bring £1,500. If he were genuinely interested the man with the moustache should do the same.
There used to be a tall, lugubrious thief called Ozzie who was often around the billiard hall. He had been in prison so many times that his nerve had gone, but he was always glad to be of use to the twins, and the following night Reggie took him with him to the Terminus Café. The maroon Rover was parked outside; Reggie was soon introducing Ozzie to its owner as a master forger. Reggie called for tea and something to eat, paying with a fiver which was automatically accepted.
‘One of his?’ asked the man with the moustache.
‘One of his,’ said Reggie.
‘Any more I can see?’
Ozzie produced a roll of fivers from his back pocket. Examining them, the man said that he couldn’t tell them from the real thing, which was hardly surprising as Reggie had drawn them just that afternoon from the Mile End branch of Barclays Bank.
Where were the rest of the notes that were for sale? In Ozzie’s flat off the Commercial Road. Why not collect them straight away and settle the deal? Five minutes later the Rover was drawing up outside the tenement where Ozzie lived with a lady pickpocket from Stoke Newington. This was the crucial point of the operation. The man with the moustache opened the door and started to get out of the car.
‘No,’ said Ozzie. ‘If you don’t object, I’d rather bring them down to you. My dear wife knows nothing of my activities. I prefer to keep my business and my private life apart.’
‘Quite right,’ said Reggie. The man closed the door, and Ozzie walked up the stairs to his flat. As soon as he was there, he rang Limehouse Police Station, gave his address and asked them to send round a squad car as the man in the flat below was murdering his wife. Three minutes later he came down the stairs holding a solid-looking brown paper parcel.
Reggie had £1,500 in his hand, ready to pay. So had the man with the moustache. All that remained to do was to examine the parcel of fivers.
The string was stiff and tightly knotted. Inside the first parcel was another, also tightly tied with string. Reggie had nearly undone it when the squad car came from Limehouse, klaxon wailing, blue lights flashing.
‘Christ,’ said Ozzie, ‘they’ve twigged. I’m off,’ and shoved the parcel into the man’s lap.
‘Don’t go without your money,’ shouted Reggie, giving him his money.
‘Here’s mine,’ said the man with the moustache, who had already got his car in gear.
‘Thanks,’ shouted Ozzie. ‘See yer,’ and the Rover hurtled off down the Commercial Road. By Aldgate Underground Reggie remembered an important appointment.
‘Sorry, I gotta go. But remember, I’m trusting you with my share of the notes.’
‘You know you can trust me, Reg.’
When the man with the moustache got back to his large house in Barnet and found that his parcel contained wads of neatly guillotined newspaper he was angry. But he should have had more sense than turn up at the billiard hall with a loaded shotgun, looking for Reggie Kray. Apart from the beating he received when he found him, he was also charged by the police later in the evening, when they picked him up, still clutching his loaded gun, from an alley in Whitechapel. He was fined £25 plus costs.
Reggie was philosophical about it all when he met Ozzie to collect his £1,500 and tipped the old thief £50 for his part in the affair. ‘Just goes to show. If people weren’t greedy and always thinking about getting something for nothing, Ozz, they wouldn’t come unstuck.’
There were old-style cockney con tricks too: some of the ways Reggie Kray made money were as ancient and dishonest as the East End itself. There was the ‘tweedle’, for instance, one of the classic cockney tricks in which the victim was sold a valuable ring at bargain price. The ring was genuine and the victim was actually encouraged to have it valued, but there always came a point, just before the money was handed over, where the con man on the tweedle switched the real ring for a replica. By the time the buyer had discovered his mistake, there was nothing he could do about it. Similarly with the ‘jargoons’, except that here the jewellery sold was fake from the start and the seller had to rely on faster talking and a quicker sale.
Reggie had a way with him. People trusted him, and he could always pick up a few pounds when he needed them from the jargoons and the tweedle. But these were small-time rackets, and Reggie Kray had no real wish to be a con man. He knew he lacked the polish and the self-deception to reach the top of this particular profession. He and Ronnie were agreed that their future would be as robber barons of crime rather than as hard-worked criminals.
FIVE
Gun Time
The 1955 Epsom Spring Meeting was a historic one for gangland and for the twins. Word had got round that the succession stakes of London villainy would shortly start as well and the twins felt a duty to be there to see what happened. Traditionally the Epsom races are an annual outing for the villains of London. Back in the days of ‘Derby’ Sabini and his gang this was where they made their biggest haul of the year. Whichever gang controlled the leading bookmakers’ pitches was automatically guaranteed a percentage of the take from every bookie on the course.
By the fifties crime had outgrown the race-gangs, but tradition lasted. Anyone who wanted to could still work out the form sheet for London crime from what went on during these few days. A smile or a brush-off would show who was rising or on the way out; a handshake make it clear that an old grudge was forgotten or a new alliance in the offing. Little went unnoticed. The year 1955 was an exceptional one for London’s criminals, and at the Spring Meeting attention was particularly focused on two of them.
One was a thin-faced gentleman called Billy Hill. He was an ex-thief and had spent seventeen of his thirty-eight years in places of detention. The other was a big, bombastic man with a large cigar who called himself Jack ‘Spot’. He was Jewish and his real name Comer. As a young man he had fought against Mosley’s black-shirts in the East End; since then he had organized his Upton Park Mob across many of the race-tracks in the country.
These two men had the complementary qualities of all natural double acts, and thanks to this they had become the Laurel and Hardy of London crime, or, as they liked to call themselves, ‘kings of London’s un
derworld’. For years they had been allies. From the mid forties, Spot with his gang of bruisers, Hill with his following of thieves had been raking over the criminal pickings of London’s West End. They had faced little opposition. The pre-war gangsters had grown tired, but the West End was booming. Night clubs and drinking clubs, prostitution and illicit gambling clubs were producing fortunes. The rich underworld of London was there to be milked by anyone who guaranteed the one thing it required – peace to prosper and grow fatter still.
This Spot and Hill had done for more than ten profitable years: running the protection, taking their cut on the gambling and using their power for one main purpose – the survival of the status quo. They had never been a criminal ‘brain’ at the centre of a web of dangerous intrigue, nor were they Mafia-style organizers. If other gangs like the Italians or the Maltese wanted a stake in the West End, Spot and Hill would come to an arrangement with them. They acted very much like businessmen, drawing their profits from a discreet monopoly, carefully preserving good relations with the police, and becoming dangerous only when they felt their plastic empire threatened. The worst threat they had to face had come from non-caring tear-aways, but these could be dealt with, and it seemed that nothing but old age would stop the coalition of Spot and Hill continuing for ever. Then the unthinkable occurred. Spot and Hill fell out.
Hill, who is now agreeably retired in a large white villa on the Mediterranean, is inclined to be charitable over what happened. ‘Jack was becoming insecure and a bit jealous of me. He was an older man, you see, and once he got this persecution complex he was impossible to work with any more.’ Spot says he should have shot Hill while he had the chance. Certainly their friendship had already gone very sour by the time the twins took over the billiard hall.
Once trouble started between gangland’s two ‘kings’ the odds were against Spot. The August before, in the so-called ‘Battle of Frith Street’, Spot had already been badly cut in the face. He was beginning to get too old for this sort of thing, and if it came to a showdown Jack Spot would need much younger, tougher allies – like the Krays. He had known of them for several years, but had kept clear of them: he could recognize trouble when he saw it.
Now things had changed, and just before the Epsom Spring Meeting Jack Spot had swallowed his pride and called on them at the billiard hall. The twins were most polite but not effusive. This was their territory. Jack Spot was asking to see them. When he offered them a pitch at Epsom races, they said they’d think about it. It was unheard of for two boys like them to have their own pitch among the country’s leading villains, but they were not impressed. ‘We never had liked Spotty. Never thought much of him.’ Finally they accepted for the hell of it. It might be interesting. ‘Interesting’ had become a favourite word of Ronnie’s.
Spot saw to everything. The twins knew nothing about racing. This did not matter. Spotty had found them a good bookmaker to ‘mind’; they simply had to stand by his pitch keeping an eye on their percentage. They also had to keep an eye on Billy Hill. He had the number-one pitch up by the winning-post, and was surrounded by some ‘interesting’ friends. There was a dark young man who smiled a lot – already one of London’s leading hatchet men, ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser. He, like Ronnie Kray, would stop at nothing in a fight. Next to him was Billie Blythe, a wild little man with a conviction for cutting a Flying Squad officer in the face; and there were others like them.
Against men like these, Jack Spot had little but his fat cigar. Five years before the men round him might have made a fight of it – not now. Several had just returned from prison. For them nothing was worth the price of going back; their softness showed. This brought everyone’s attention to the twins. Young as they were, they suddenly seemed to be challenging the toughest criminals in London. They also had a chance of seeing just how vulnerable and weak their allies were. But their behaviour puzzled everyone. It was hard to tell if it was sheer bravado or stupidity. For the twins seemed to be making a point of totally ignoring their danger. They appeared as unimpressed by Hill’s men as by Spot’s.
Most of the Italian gang were there, intent as usual upon weighing up the odds between the two sides. One of them knew Reggie well enough to feel he should warn him what he was taking on.
‘This lot mean business. You two must be stark staring mad to show up here with Spotty. If you want to kill yourselves, there are less painful ways of doing it.’
The twins laughed and offered him a drink. When he had gone, Ronnie turned to his brother. ‘The way these old men worry, Reg. Fair makes you sick.’
For the rest of that day the twins kept up their show of insolent indifference against the best-known gangsters in the country. They drank, they entertained their friends, they roared with laughter, they ignored the racing and the betting. Finally Ronnie yawned and rolled off to sleep. When the day ended they collected what was owed them, and without bothering to thank Spot drove off in their van.
In fact, of course, the whole performance had been carefully thought out. Their day at the races had been a conscious demonstration of contempt for the older generation of criminals, just as their alliance with Jack Spot had been a determined bid for power. ‘It wasn’t that we liked him. We despised him really. We just turned out with Spotty to show everyone that we was the up-and-coming firm and didn’t give a fuck for anyone. Old Spotty understood. Whatever else he may have been he wasn’t stupid. He knew quite well that though we were there in theory as his friends, we meant to end up taking over from him.’
It was an exciting prospect, the big chance the twins had both been waiting for. For it to happen they had to stage the one thing all the other criminals at Epsom wanted to avoid – gang war, a real showdown with the enemy. Excitedly they prepared for total war, a running fight with the top West End gangsters where they could use their guns, and show how much tougher and more ruthless they and their followers could be against the old gangland kings. Ronnie was in his element collecting weapons, making plans, haranguing followers at the billiard hall. Fort Vallance was prepared as a redoubt and a headquarters. For several days the twins continued to mobilize. Then came the news that Blythe and Fraser and their friends wanted to fight it out in a pub near Islington. The twins were ready.
This was their moment, and that night London was very near a wave of gang-killing on a scale it had never seen before. Both the twins and their opponents finally meant business. Once shooting started it would be hard to stop; the retribution would inevitably roll on.
The twins filled their van with arms and a dozen of the best fighters from the billiard hall. Armed to the eyebrows they drove off to Islington. Ronnie had told them that their hour had come. But the pub was empty. They made themselves at home and waited for the enemy to come. This was a chance to ambush everyone and shoot it out with the advantage of surprise. Still no one came. Nobody entered the pub that night with the twins there and at closing time they could do nothing except call it a day and drive away. Ronnie was furious, and for several days he issued challenges and insults to the rival gang. They were entirely ignored. If the twins wanted action it was soon clear that no one else did.
Later they heard that Billy Hill had been alarmed to hear about the challenge and had immediately called the battle off. The last thing he wanted now was bloodshed, Krays and trouble with the Law. Nor, when it came to it, did Spot. He too had had a little time to think. It was one thing to make a show at Epsom with the twins – quite another to become involved in a full-scale war where people would be killed. Spottie had always been a law-abiding monarch. He would far rather abdicate than hang.
And so the big war never came. The twins were carefully edged out from the dramatic role they wanted. For a while at least the old guard had succeeded in putting them firmly in their places. And 1955, which had begun so hopefully for the twins, ended with this setback, and neither was allowed to play a real part in the last rounds of the Spot-Hill feud that went on until the spring of 1956.
For a while they stil
l had hopes. Nominal allies still of Spot, both twins and various followers did start coming west. Most evenings they would drop in at a club off the Tottenham Court Road where Spot still held court as in the old days. They had a certain status now, and found that they were getting talked about. One of Jack Spot’s more genial lieutenants taught them a thing or two. Reggie began thinking of the money waiting to be picked up in the West End, Ronnie of machine-guns, bombs and full-scale war to exterminate Hill’s following, leaving the Kray twins free to rule London as Capone ruled Chicago.
The only trouble was Jack Spot. True, he did take them racing once again to Leeds, but this was not what they required. He would not ‘educate’ them, as they hoped, about his rackets. These were his secret. Nor would he use them in a real fight. He wanted money, not machine-guns.
On the May night in 1956 when Frankie Fraser and Alf Warren waited for Jack Spot outside his flat in Bayswater, and put a second set of gashes in his face, the twins were not involved. They visited him in hospital next day. Now was the moment for the war they longed for. They guaranteed control of London within twenty-four hours. All that was needed was for Spot to give the word. Spottie roiled over in his bed and looked the other way.
Jack Spot retired and bought a bowler hat and a furniture business off the Gloucester Road. Billy Hill retired and bought a white Lincoln convertible and a house in southern Spain. An era of so-called organized crime was over. London was hotting up; no single organization could control it, certainly not with the old-fashioned methods of Spot and Hill. The twins went back to Bethnal Green. With Jack Spot’s help they could have moved in on the rich rackets of the West End. Without him they were lost.