The Profession of Violence

by John Pearson

  Criminals are realists. During these first few weeks after the twins’ arrest, the con men, club-owners, racketeers who for years had provided their regular income had prudently been honouring old arrangements. Now they were forgetting them. So were the wealthy businessmen with whom the twins had ‘banked’ their money for emergencies like this. The vast amounts of money that the twins had taken had been squandered. Nothing was in reserve. The house in Suffolk was made ready to be sold, and then came the ultimate indignity – the twins applied for legal aid for their defence.

  When the trial opened on 6 July it began before the Metropolitan Chief Magistrate at Old Street, Mr Frank Milton. Legally the purpose of this preliminary hearing was to discover if there was a case for the twins to answer at a superior court. But both the twins and the police were set to make these hearings something of a demonstration from the start. For the police this took the form of a massed show of force reminiscent of the precautions the Italian carabinieri mount for an important Mafia trial in Palermo. The court was in a state of siege, with police everywhere. Witnesses were closely guarded and produced in court from secret hideouts. The twins and their supporters were whisked straight from prison in a high-speed convoy, guarded by outriders and an elite task-force of police. It was a compliment of a sort to the legend of their power. The police were treating them like a hostile force still capable of challenging the State.

  In response to this the twins decided they would waive the traditional ban on reporting from these preliminary hearings. It was a gesture. ‘We want the world to see the diabolical liberties the law’s been taking,’ Reggie said. They also wanted their publicity. Once the case started it would soon be clear that they did not have much else. The ‘driving of the Krays into the ground’ had started. Nipper Read had gone to town, and the twins soon knew it.

  Set-faced, unsmiling in the front row of the dock, they found themselves up against something they had never faced before – denunciations from their former friends who had ‘gone over to the enemy’. One of the first was a man called Billy Exley, one-time lightweight boxer, thief and bodyguard of Ronnie’s. His abrupt appearance in court was carefully stage-managed and most dramatic. The twins had no idea that he had turned against them. As far as they knew Exley had stayed absolutely loyal. Before he appeared in the dock the prosecution had announced that the next witness was suffering from an acute heart condition. A chair was placed in the witness-box, along with a microphone. Then in shuffled Exley, looking deathly pale. The twins watched, stony-faced, and in the hush that filled the court Exley began his evidence on how he used to run their long-firm frauds.

  But his appearance meant considerably more than what he said about the frauds. He seemed to speak with difficulty. The court was warned he might drop dead any moment, so that his words seemed like the voice of conscience from the tomb. It was impressive that a man like Exley felt an obligation to recant before he died and name his former friends as evil men. What must have shocked the twins was the thought of all their other secrets he could reveal to the Law. Exley knew the truth about Cornell. Exley was the man who stayed on guard at Vallance Road armed with a shotgun on the night of the murder. Exley had helped to guard Frank Mitchell. If the police had him on their side, they must already know far more than had seemed possible when the case opened.

  But the police had more than Exley, and in the days that followed it was clear that the Krays’ wall of silence had collapsed. Forgotten victims, former accomplices trooped through the witness-box. The underworld was talking. From this point on the twins knew there were no secrets they could count on keeping. Most dangerous of all for them was the surprise appearance of the frightened barmaid from The Blind Beggar. Previously she had failed to identify Ronnie on the identity parade held after Cornell’s murder. Since then Superintendent Harry Mooney had won her confidence and managed to convince her that she had nothing to fear from telling what she saw on the night of the killing. Now in the witness-box she claimed that the twins had scared her into silence, but in fact she had clearly recognized Ronnie and Ian Barrie as the men who fired the shots.

  This was the true turning-point in the trial. Until now the twins still had a slender chance that the key witnesses might hold back. Now it was clear that the police had all the evidence required to destroy them. The only questions now were how much more the police investigations would reveal, and whether the twins could spring any surprises in their defence.

  Their trial at the Old Bailey started in the New Year of 1969 and was to prove the longest, most expensive criminal trial to date in British history. By now the situation was quite different from the first days of the twins’ arrest. The police had done their work – the case against them was complete. The twins had changed too during the eight months they had spent in Brixton on remand. The optimistic messages had ceased and both seemed quietly resigned to a long spell in prison. They were already turning their attention to their return to freedom some time in middle age, and for both of them the idea of crime was over. Reggie’s dream still meant marrying Christine and starting a family somewhere in the country. Ronnie for once appeared more practical: ‘I’ll have grey hair by then, but grey’s distinguished on a man. There’ll be a spot of money still around and I’ll find myself a nice boy and sail off round the world with him. There’s still a lot I want to see and do with my life.’

  In the meantime there was the trial to think about, and the twins seemed far more convinced with their lasting reputation than with mere details of defence. Since they believed the outcome more or less decided, they would concentrate on the impression they would leave posterity.

  This was the moment when they sealed their myth. What they wanted was to be remembered as the greatest undefeated heavyweights of crime.

  The attitude of the police towards the trial was not dissimilar, and like the twins they also wanted it to be something of a demonstration – in their case of the power of the Law, a full-scale warning for all future violent gangsters.

  This explains much of what happened during the long weeks ahead in Number One Court. The first case to be heard consisted of a double murder – the Cornell and the McVitie killings were taken together. Reggie was accused as an accessory to the Cornell crime for knowingly helping Ronnie after his escape. And although Reggie was accused of killing McVitie with his brother’s help, there was a group of other alleged accessories with them in the dock – Bender and the Lambrianou brothers, young Tony Barry, who was charged with bringing round the gun from The Regency, the twins’ brother Charlie Kray and his friend Frederick Foreman, both of them charged with getting rid of Jack McVitie’s body.

  But from the moment the accused filed into the cage-like dock of the Old Bailey their greatest worry must have been the two men who were no longer with them – Scotch Jack Dickson, who had driven Ronnie to The Blind Beggar, and the twins’ cousin, Ronnie Hart. Nipper Read had done his work efficiently – Dickson and Hart had both ‘gone over to the other side’ and turned Queen’s evidence. Both were to be major witnesses for the police.

  It was a long, long trial with little subtlety. The judge was Mr Melford Stevenson, a brisk old gentleman with a reputation as something of a ‘hard’ judge; from the beginning he was concise, concerned with facts. The prosecuting counsel, Mr Kenneth Jones, QC, was a plump, sonorous Welshman, ‘somewhat afflicted’, as he put it, ‘with a want of height’. Like both the judge and the police, his main concern appeared to be with facts, although he was not above a certain lumbering theatricality to drive home the full horror of the evidence.

  ‘Gentlemen of the jury, think for a moment of the horrifying effrontery, the terrifying effrontery of this deed. Two men can walk into a public house on any evening and there in cold blood kill another human being. You may well ask, who within striking distance would be safe? Who would come before the court and have the courage to say who the killers were? Cornell’s companions took to their heels, but I will bring before you the barmaid, and she will tell you that
she recognizes the killer of George Cornell.’

  The greater the horror and the melodrama, the more it suited Ronnie. Shooting Cornell had been the greatest moment of his life – he felt that he was justified, and here it was being publicly acknowledged. This was almost fame enough.

  All the defence could do was attack witnesses – Ronnie enjoyed this, too, for these were all people that he hated: they had betrayed him.

  ‘So, Mr Hart, you admit that you have given all this evidence to save your own skin?’

  ‘Not to save my skin, but because I thought it right.’

  ‘But, just the same, because you thought it right, you have saved yourself from sitting in the dock beside the men you are accusing? Answer me please, Mr Hart.’

  This sort of sniping could go on for ever; at times it seemed as if it would. When all the trials ended, twenty-eight criminals had been allowed to save themselves by giving evidence against the twins. Often it was hard to know which was the more nauseating – the crime or the unction of the man denouncing it. All these turncoats in the witness-box spoke vehemently against the twins – they had to justify themselves and had a bigger stake than anyone in seeing that their former friends were put away for good.

  What Nipper Read had told the lawyers at New Scotland Yard more than a year before was proving quite correct. The twins, it seemed, could be condemned only with the help of other criminals’ evidence. Such criminals could be shown up for what they were, but their combined evidence could not be totally discredited.

  The defence was led by John Platts-Mills, QC, for Ronnie: Paul Wrightson, QC, appeared for Reggie. Much of their time and energy in court was spent attacking witnesses and impugning the methods of the police – without conspicuous success. This trial was shedding little lustre on the Law, but Nipper and his men appeared to have worked scrupulously ‘in their sewers’; it was a dirty business, but the essential facts could not be challenged.

  Beyond this there seemed no particular plan of defence, only this endless war of somnolent attrition, with the twins at the centre of it, becoming less credible with every day that passed.

  Ronnie made one unforgettable appearance in the witness-box as the case neared its end. People who knew him understood that this was the moment he had been waiting for and there was speculation over what would happen. If the twins really had some secret up their sleeves, now was the time to use it. Now was the time to mention all those public figures he had threatened to expose. It was also the point where he might have tried to put his own case forward, to enlist some public sympathy.

  None of this was what he wanted. It would have seemed petty to give trouble to the many celebrities he could have named as his friends or to stir up scandals now. It would have been easy, but this wasn’t how he wished to be remembered. Nor did he want the straight world’s sympathy – still less its understanding. He was a criminal and he would act like one.

  He was immaculately dressed – the usual dark-blue suit, white shirt and tightly knotted tie. He also wore his gold-rimmed spectacles. These made him look particularly sinister. His face showed no emotion as he began answering his counsel’s questions. His voice was expressionless and flat and he seemed short of breath. But soon he began to dominate the court. He denied everything alleged against him. He and Cornell were friends. He never even entered The Blind Beggar on the night of 8 March 1966. After the mass of prosecution evidence there was a calm effrontery about anyone who could lie on such a scale. And it was not done meekly or apologetically, but with an undiminished hatred for all who stood against him. This hatred seemed a sort of pride. After the indignities of his defeat, the betrayals of his followers, he was admitting nothing and regretting nothing. If people said he was a murderer, let them prove it.

  Under cross-examination by the prosecution he became still more confident. This was presumably what the prosecution wanted, for his attitude confirmed everything the court had heard against him. He was crude, sneering, violent, but at the same time he was trying to present the public self that he aspired to: arrogant and unconcerned, denying everything, friend of the famous – ‘If I wasn’t here, I’d probably be drinking with Judy Garland now’) – benefactor of the poor and victim of the police.

  What made the trial so strange was that the public image of the twins was all that anybody saw or mentioned. There were a few occasions when just a glimmer of their real selves broke through, usually in anger when they lost control: Ronnie beside himself with rage, calling the prosecuting counsel ‘you fat slob’ because the police had confiscated his grandparents’ pension books; Reggie yelling that the police were ‘scum’ for daring to intrude at Frances’s funeral. This was all. There was no real talk of motive, no interest in the minds behind the cardboard monsters who killed Cornell and Jack McVitie. Neither side so much as mentioned the one key fact that ruled their lives – that they were twins.

  * * *

  The Kray trial might have been not just the longest, but the most fascinating murder trial in history. That it was not was really the twins’ own decision. They wanted privacy and got it; they were the ones who stopped the one defence that could conceivably have shaken the prosecution’s case, a defence based upon the nature and responsibility of twins.

  The fact that there had never been a case like this argued in law before need not have mattered. There had never been a pair of criminal twins like the Krays before, and only in recent years has the relationship between identical twins been understood. It seems indisputable that Reggie Kray could have built a powerful defence along the lines of diminished responsibility, had he chosen to. But this would have meant betraying Ronnie and denouncing him as his evil genius. It would also have meant the end of Ronnie’s world, the destruction of the twins and of the violent dream that had sustained them both since childhood.

  Gratefully the court was spared the task of settling responsibility for crimes committed when one disordered mind can dominate two separate bodies. Whatever may have been the truth, the twins were judged as separate and responsible individuals. This was what everybody wanted, themselves included. And it was as separate and responsible murderers that they were sentenced to life imprisonment, ‘which I would recommend should not be less than thirty years’, by Mr Justice Melford Stevenson on 8 March 1969.

  The twins were thirty-four. Their active life was over.

  Provided the judge’s recommendation was respected they would be sixty-four before they emerged into the outside world again. After the McVitie-Cornell verdict there were still countless other charges waiting to be heard against them. Most important was the murder of Frank Mitchell, but this time there was held to be insufficient evidence, and although Reggie Kray pleaded guilty to helping Mitchell to escape both twins were found not guilty of the murder. This was enough – the remaining charges were kept ‘on the file’ and the twins consigned to live their lives until the onset of old age in maximum security.

  Du Rose retired, Cooper disappeared, their chief betrayer Ronnie Hart attempted to commit suicide, and Nipper Read, after promotion to Commander, went back at forty-six to Nottingham as Deputy Chief Constable.

  The twins were parted for three years. Reggie seemed happy enough alone, started weight-lifting and forgot the past. Ronnie began painting – always the same picture of a country landscape with a distant cottage and a tree. When he felt miserable he would paint a black sun in the sky. Only one thing really worried him – he wanted Reggie back. Violet campaigned for this with all her usual energy; early in 1972 the twins were reunited in the maximum security wing of Parkhurst Gaol.

  Ronnie had everything he needed. Reggie could look after him. They were completely self-sufficient and kept their distance from the other murderers who made up their stationary world.

  But it would be wrong to allow the Kray twins to be forgotten. Their trial was concerned with cutting them down to size and left a picture of them both as blundering murderers duly defeated by the police. In fact they were more dangerous than this. Mor
e disturbing than the gruesome revelations from the witness-box was something that the prosecution and the court tended to overlook – the actual scale of their success. The Kray twins are important not as cheap murderers, but as professionals of violence, and it is their career and not their downfall that is significant.

  The odds against their rise appear to have been enormous. They lacked finesse and had no education and no knowledge of the world. They were emotionally unstable, and most criminologists would probably dismiss them as anachronisms – the last of the old-style cockney villains acting out half-baked fantasies of Al Capone’s Chicago. Yet despite this they came close to building a true empire of crime in Britain – and did it with extraordinary ease.

  It is this ease that is disturbing. Any society that lets two cockney villains get away with what the Kray twins did must be quite frighteningly vulnerable and, if nothing else, their rise to power shows just how fragile the whole skin of order is in Britain. All they really did was bring the threat of violence into areas that had previously been relatively free from it – the fringes of big business, society and politics, the world of the suburban clubs and of the new legalized West End gambling. They had no startling techniques, and violence apart their one unerring instinct was for corruption. They could smell out the vulnerable as a pig smells truffles, and the corrupt became their victims. The violent will always feed on the corrupt, and it was not surprising that the twins found greater possibilities in society at large than in the poverty of Bethnal Green.

  The use the Kray twins made of these new possibilities is something of an object lesson in what violence can achieve in Britain. They used it to create an area of freedom from the law. In different quarters it was the twins’ name, not the law’s, that kept the peace. People knew that they had more to lose from the twins’ enmity than they would ever gain from the law’s protection. The twins’ power was a challenge to the authority of the State and for a long time it appeared as if the State were powerless against them. For they seemed to have stumbled on the formula for an independent, self-perpetuating criminal power in Britain.