by John Pearson
Reggie proposed to Frances in the autumn of 1961. She turned him down, saying that she was far too young to think of marriage. Reggie suspected that the real reason was that her parents secretly disapproved of him. To show how wrong they were and prove himself to Frances he decided to become a real success.
For some time now, Ronnie had been complaining that he was neglecting their business interests. Suddenly Reggie began attending to them. All his old energy and interest revived; he began keeping accounts in the laborious, backwards-sloping script that was such a contrast to Ronnie’s ill-formed scrawl. Soon he was thinking of expansion. The new gambling clubs and betting shops were obvious targets. Provided he used his brain there was no need for unpleasantness or threats. The twins were businessmen, offering a service that these places needed. Their ‘name’ was an insurance policy against trouble and there was something of the insurance salesman about Reggie as he began whipping up fresh clients. He bought a black Crombie overcoat and started thinking of an office and a secretary. Les Payne gave him a briefcase like his own that Christmas; as Reggie drove from Vallance Road to the West End with it on the front seat of his Mercedes he felt he had a settled job at last with all the trappings of respectability – Frances approved of that. And he was back with Ronnie in the only life he really understood. It seemed the perfect compromise to make everybody happy.
For a few months it worked: the twins made money and avoided trouble. Then Ronnie turned. Reggie and his briefcase – who did he think he was?
Nor did Frances seem to get much happiness from the new arrangement. Reggie was so on edge. They often danced late at The Hirondelle and called in at Esmeralda’s Barn for a last drink. One night they found Ronnie there, drunker than usual; for the first time the twins had a slanging match with Frances present. She was terrified. All the old arguments and hatreds were brought out and finally Ronnie stumbled off, shouting that he had done with them for good. This had often happened in the past, only to be forgotten when he sobered up. This time he meant it and that evening marked a turning-point in his career.
He often used to spend the night in an old caravan on a bomb-site near Vallance Road. He went there now and stayed. Next day he sent his driver to the flat in Chelsea for his clothes. His West End life was over.
He still drew money from the Barn but rarely went there or bothered with its business. Suddenly he had other interests. One day it was a treasure hunt to the Congo. He had heard a rumour of several million dollars’ worth of treasure buried by mercenaries in the jungle to the south of Brazzaville, and for a week or two talked of nothing else. Then he planned an English branch of Murder Incorporated. He thought of starting a crack regiment of London tearaways, equipping it at his own expense and personally leading it into action on behalf of a new African state. A religious mood followed: he announced he was sick of possessions and pain and hurting people and was leaving any day to work in a leper colony.
He could believe anything according to his mood. The visits to the lady clairvoyant increased, as he relied on her crystal ball for advice. His spirit guide was looking after him and she confirmed that he was the reincarnation of Attila the Hun and a Samurai warrior: he would achieve greatness through violence and then die young.
After a few weeks in his caravan he moved into Cedra Court, a block of thirtyish ‘luxury flats’ in Walthamstow, installing himself with a haphazard splendour which would have surprised his new middle-class neighbours. The decor was cockney Moroccan: rugs, leathercraft, silk hangings, brass trays had all been purchased on a recent visit to North Africa. Some of the rooms were without curtains or carpets, but in the living-room there was a large-screen television, several big bright-coloured china vases, gilt mirrors, a yard-long plaster figure of a recumbent Alsatian and an oil painting of a naked boy in a Victorian gold frame.
‘I feel happy,’ he told people, ‘now I’ve got a place of my own.’
But the soft life was not for him.
‘I’ve got to be someone, do something. Here am I nearly thirty, and going to die young.’
Because of this he had to hurry if he was to fulfil himself. He began building up another army in the East End. He could have had the pick of the top London villains, but he chose carefully. This time he wanted men dependent on him, men he could dominate. He already had a great range of contacts, ‘useful’ people he could count on to be ‘with him’ out of fear or obligation or self-interest in an emergency.
‘If it was necessary I could have two hundred armed men in an hour anywhere in London.’
Previously the twins’ closest followers had been cockneys; most of their new men came from outside London. Ian Barrie and ‘Scotch Jack’ Dickson were former Glasgow safe-blowers who learned to fight with the gangs of the Gorbals. Eighteen-stone ‘Big Pat’ Connolly, already in the Firm, was another Scot. Ronnie liked outsiders without London loyalties. For some time no one could be sure what new men were in the Firm. Ronnie was careful to find them legitimate employment. Some were installed as managers of East End drinking clubs and ‘spielers’: others moved round as strong-arm men in West End clubs the twins protected. He fixed up one man as sales representative with a big London engineering company; the managing director had been under obligation to Ronnie from the earliest days of the Barn. While Ronnie organized his army Reggie was busy building up protection among the freshly legalized West End gambling clubs. Thanks to his efforts, the twins’ take more than doubled from this source in 1962.
The new casinos with their high profits and new middle-class clientele were far more vulnerable than the illicit gambling clubs of the past. Even the suggestion of police interest in a club could scare off the new-style customers. Club-owners seemed prepared for peace at any price – even Reggie’s. So there was still no need for him to be involved in too much violence. With Ronnie in the background, the Kray name was quite enough. Clients began to come to him.
Reggie compared himself with other experts clubs required – lawyers or caterers or public relations firms. He was efficient and for what he had to offer no one could call his price excessive. He was the best around. A new club opening in Shepherd’s Market felt it wise to ensure against trouble from the start by buying the protection of the Kray name for £150 a week. More followed: two in Knightsbridge, three in Chelsea, several in Mayfair. Reggie devised a tariff based on the club’s profits. It was an inclusive charge. One night two young men threatened to bomb a club near Grosvenor Square. The manager wanted to keep the police out and asked Reggie’s help. Next morning one of the men telephoned the club apologizing, and another £150 a week began to flow into the Kray funds.
Reggie was smart enough to see that foreign interests were becoming attracted to London gambling. He had heard rumours that the American Mafia, anxious to diversify investments, was trying to buy into several of the smartest Mayfair clubs. The French and Canadians were also busy. Reggie made sure that they contacted him early in negotiations. All these foreigners took it for granted that the conventions of smoothly organized protection on the American pattern operated in London, an assumption he was more than willing to encourage.
Reggie Kray’s love for Frances changed with his success. She was not quite his Cinderella any more, but an important part of the business, the gangster’s girl, taken for granted by the Firm. Her looks and youth went well with Reggie Kray the businessman around the West End. He bought her clothes, jewellery, a gold necklace, and liked to feel she was a credit to him. Ronnie became almost polite towards her.
She was the one who had the doubts, as the rich, claustrophobic gangster’s world closed in on her. The large men and the large cars started to oppress her. She was becoming bored. Sometimes Reggie took her for a weekend by the sea. Here they would still enjoy themselves, but back in London he became impossible, especially when he drank. She tried to leave him several times, but soon found there were not that many boys willing to risk going out with Reg Kray’s girl-friend – especially as he was still set on marrying her.
By this time Ronnie was ready for his greatest coup. He had the Firm assembled and had worked out his objectives. During his period at Esmeralda’s Barn he had learned one important lesson – that Mayfair was not only richer but more vulnerable than Mile End. The sort of crime he had carried on in Whitechapel would work just as well in the swinging London of the sixties; he would use the methods of old-style cockney villainy to blackmail, trick and terrify his way into big business, smart society, credit-dealing, large-scale fraud.
He had considerable resources. There was the old myth of the twins’ immunity from the Law and the carefully spread rumour that they had so many senior policemen bribed or blackmailed that any information offered to Scotland Yard about them came back to them. (There was, in fact, more than a grain of truth in this.) There was the code of silence, the assumption that it was unwise to talk about the twins because they always knew who had gone against them. There was the gaol network, bringing them information from the prisons and ensuring that while their associates were ‘away’ they would be looked after and their enemies discreetly dealt with. And there were the link-ups and pay-offs with a range of criminal allies throughout London – the Colonel’s ‘politics of crime’.
But Ronnie had been picking up some unusual fresh ideas about crime and violence. One of the few books he read at this time was Mein Kampf. Much of it bored him, but he understood the way Hitler insisted on the need for propaganda and a secret service as prerequisites of power in the modern State.
Eight years before, Ronnie had sat in the old billiard hall in Eric Street, paying his boys five shillings a time for scraps of information; now he had spies across the whole of London. In the East End he had his following of barmen, taxi-drivers, small-time criminals wishing to keep well in with the Krays and sending in regular reports to Vallance Road. In the West End he could use Esmeralda’s Barn as a vantage-point and paid in fifties and hundreds for information he could use. The Barn was the ideal place for rumours from the world around him: anyone could be his spy – a businessman who had gambled too heavily and happened to know about a City fraud; a male prostitute with incriminating letters from a prominent politician who should have had more sense than to write them in the first place; a thief who knew the time and place when a rival gang would rob a bank. Ronnie had a surprising memory for facts. His mind was full of the crime and scandal of the city; sooner or later it invariably came in useful.
The information service was invaluable in other ways. In 1962 alone, at least three plans were made to murder the twins: one by a home-made bomb planted in their favourite pub, another by poison and a third by three Corsican gunmen hired by a West End club-owner with a grudge. The bomb, neatly defused, was delivered back to the man who ordered it. The intending poisoner had his jaw broken in a club in Old Compton Street. Three slightly worried Corsicans were met at Heathrow Airport by a reception committee who sent them straight home on the next flight to Paris.
With gangsters as with politicians, what they do counts far less than what they are thought to do: the twins had the politician’s rare asset of perpetual credibility. People would always think the worst of them. Ronnie exploited this, using his followers and anyone he met to spread the wildest rumours of the twins’ power. He loved to lard his conversation with hints of depravity and unspeakable wickedness, insinuating that the twins were behind every racket and maiming throughout London. It was even suggested that they killed for fun.
Every society seems to need a bogeyman. Ronnie began to play the part, living for the hush that fell across a room when he entered, the glances from other tables when he was at dinner, the tension in a bar until he left.
Vanity apart, notoriety was good for business. The twins’ name for evil placed them above all competitors. Nobody wished to fight a legend.
In the first week of March 1962, the East End had its own royal film premiere. Sparrers Can’t Sing, a sentimental cockney comedy of errors with Barbara Windsor, the East End’s blonde bombshell, opened at the Empire Cinema in Bow Road before the Snowdons and a society audience. It was a gala night for Stepney. When the film ended and the royal couple drove off along Commercial Road in their Rolls, the film cast and their friends went to a celebration party at the new club opposite. It was called The Kentucky. Waiting to meet them were its young proprietors, immaculate in evening dress: the Kray twins.
The Kentucky was their latest venture, a plushier version of The Double R, designed to bring a smarter clientele to the East End. They had seen the publicity value of the premiere and arranged the grandest cockney party of the year. Queenie Watts was there to sing. Lord Effingham to mingle with the guests. There was all the brown ale anyone could drink; dancing went on till 3 A.M. The celebrities and the earlier presence of royalty made the occasion ideal for the twins, who were attempting to present themselves as local figures of success. Prestige had begun to matter. So had their local charities.
It would be wrong to be too cynical about the twins’ philanthropy. They certainly enjoyed giving money away, but it is interesting that whenever they gave to charity, none of the local papers missed the fact. Back in July 1961 they had been photographed beaming beside the Mayor of Bethnal Green, Councillor Hare, at the St Matthew’s Youth Club dance in aid of the organ fund. Since then their life as cockney worthies had been flourishing. Councillor Hare launched his Old Folks’ Appeal: ‘One of the first to make a donation, a gleaming television set, was “local businessman” Reginald Kray.’
So it went on – boys’ clubs, cancer funds, hospitals and old people’s homes never appealed in vain. This was becoming a key part of the twin’s publicity, something to counterbalance all the tales of terror that were spread. Besides, the charities appeared to be a way of widening their circle of acquaintance. When the Repton Amateur Boxing Club put on a special show that November, ‘local businessman Ronald Kray’ donated all the trophies. The East London Advertiser ran a half-page tribute to the generosity of the twins, complete with photograph of Ronnie Kray with Billy Walker, the boxer, and the news that Ronnie had bought £220 worth of tickets. His guests included Joan Littlewood, Barbara Windsor, Victor Spinetti and Terry Spinks. According to the paper he had also invited Charlie Smirke, jockey, and Sir John Gielgud, actor.
This expansion of their public image brought the twins closer to each other. To all outsiders they were ‘the Twins’ now, firmly cemented in their double act by growing notoriety: fame, income, self-respect seemed to depend upon their togetherness.
Reggie was still the businessman: each minute of his day seemed to be filled with people to see, details to be taken care of. But it was Ronnie who was always there to force the pace, Ronnie who was unpredictable. He had the drive, the presence and the big ideas. Reggie was the one who usually toned down the violence, and tried to prevent Ronnie’s excesses getting out of hand. Ronnie might dominate but Reggie felt that only he knew Ronnie well enough to hold him back.
That autumn they were together more than usual; there were fewer weekends away for Reggie, fewer nights out with Frances. The twins even dressed alike again, with identical gold jewellery, black gleaming shoes and tightly knotted ties. The light-heartedness of those first few months after Reggie’s return from prison seemed over.
Just before Christmas, Reggie and Frances had their biggest row. She objected to the way Ronnie and his friends were taking over all their private life. He said her parents were trying to put her against him. At one point he was in tears, but finally agreed it would be best for them to see less of each other for a while.
‘I saw that with the name the twins were getting, I could soon streamline crime and use them both to form a syndicate to ensure that things got done as in the States. I knew the Richardsons and the rest of the top villains: nothing could have been easier then than tying the whole thing together so that all the robbery with violence, all the fraud, protection, villainy came under one control.’
The idea of becoming the brain behind the twins struck several men
besides Leslie Payne and proved their downfall. Payne was too shrewd for this. He hated violence; he knew the twins and was too moderate a man to cast himself as unifying genius of Britain’s gangland. During the two years since he had changed their lives by organizing their entry into Esmeralda’s Barn, he had been quietly co-directing the gambling in Wilton Place and doing nicely. He arranged the business side of their new club for them and that was all.
But while he could see the dangerous elements in the twins and had no wish to be the king of crime, they offered certain possibilities which it was hard to resist. With them there was a fortune to be made, and Leslie Payne started to use his brains and charm to work things out. This was when the rackets really started. There were endless possibilities in big business fraud; Payne and the twins began to make a lot of money.
The rackets varied but the twins’ role remained the same. They were the source of fear, the men behind the scenes whose name ensured results. Few of their operations actually misfired; when they did, lesser men would take the rap. No one would risk denouncing the twins in court; it was understood that anyone going to prison for them would be suitably rewarded and his family looked after. Betrayal was unthinkable.
Thanks to the speed with which they worked, mistakes were rare. The twins and Leslie Payne ran a smooth operation. Their commonest racket was the ‘long-firm’ fraud, one of the simplest dishonest ways of making money ever devised. All that was needed was a little capital, an element of nerve, a front man and the threat of violence.