Bringing Down the Krays

by Bobby Teale

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: Facing Down the Past

  Chapter 1: Lost and Found

  Chapter 2: Part of the Family

  Chapter 3: Down the 66 and Up the West End

  Chapter 4: A Casual Violence

  Chapter 5: Bungs and Bodies

  Chapter 6: The Cedra Court Scene

  Chapter 7: Puppies and Flowers

  Chapter 8: The Party Comes to Me

  Chapter 9: Dead Men Can’t Speak

  Chapter 10: The Turning Point

  Chapter 11: Moresby Road – and a Trip to Dartmoor

  Chapter 12: Beside the Seaside

  Chapter 13: A Close Shave

  Chapter 14: A Walk in the Woods

  Chapter 15: The Set-Up

  Chapter 16: David’s Story

  Chapter 17: Alfie’s Story

  Chapter 18: My Story

  Chapter 19: Bringing Down the House of Cards

  Chapter 20: Mum and Christine’s Stories

  Chapter 21: Secrets and Lies

  Chapter 22: Into the Lions’ Den

  Chapter 23: The Deal

  Chapter 24: Slipping Away

  Epilogue: Forty Years On

  Note

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Brought to you by KeVkRaY

  About the Book

  Bobby Teale and his brothers, David and Alfie, were the three men the Kray twins trusted most. They weren’t in the Firm, they were closer than that. They were old family friends, confidants, companions…

  But then things changed. Witnessing Ronnie and Reggie become increasingly psychotic – taking murder, torture and rape to sickening new levels – Bobby knew he had to take action. Unknown to his brothers, he became a police informer; risking not just his own life but those of the people dearest to him too.

  Using the codename ‘Phillips’, he spent the next three years living on his wits, feeding back information to Scotland Yard. With bent cops on their side the Krays knew they had a grass in their midst, but before they could flush him out, Bobby’s evidence saw the gangsters get locked up for life.

  Bobby fled the country, but now 40 years on he’s back. And he wants to set the record straight. With the help of his brothers, the man brave enough to stand up to the Krays has rewritten history as we know it; dispelling the myths and tearing apart the gangsters’ glamorous veneer to reveal the true, sadistic nature of Ronnie and Reggie.

  Crammed full of explosive, new revelations, Bringing Down The Krays is the last great untold story of Britain’s most famous crime family.

  About the Author

  Bobby Teale was born in central London in the middle of the Second World War, the third eldest of seven children. He met the Krays as a teenager and, after giving evidence at their trial, he left Britain in 1969 for a new life in America. Today he lives in Cedar Hills, Utah with his third wife Dawne.

  He has written this extraordinary story with the help and love of his two brothers, David and Alfie Teale.

  To our mother, Ellen Teale, and to Christine Teale

  PROLOGUE

  FACING DOWN THE PAST

  I have spent a long time trying to forget who I really am. Look at me and you’d see an average guy as anonymous as the battered pick-up truck I drive and the plaid shirt I wear at weekends. I am a Canadian citizen with right of residence in the US, as good a neighbour and as law-abiding a citizen in our little slice of the state of Utah as anyone could wish for.

  Most of my life I worked in the construction business. I still do. But once, a long time before, I had been someone very different.

  The only bit of me which has stayed the same is my name, the one my parents gave me: Robert Frank Teale. Most people call me Bobby.

  A few Christmases back, my daughter Paula bought me a large picture book as a present. It was called Defining Moments in History, and it included major world events such as Pearl Harbor and the assassination of JFK, plus quirky stuff like the invention of sliced bread. Sitting there in our home with all the kids opening their gifts around me, I skimmed through it until I came across a page that featured a photo of a horse-drawn hearse.

  The name ‘REG’ was written on the side in big letters made out of flowers and the word ‘RESPECT’ was on the top, made out of more floral tributes. A huge crowd was following on foot and in an endless line of cars. The picture was taken in east London on 11 October 2000, so the caption said. I didn’t recognise quite where it was, but I knew exactly who it was in the coffin on his way to the cemetery.

  I felt a sudden torrent of emotion. Trying to hide it, I stood up and got the attention of the family, saying casually: ‘See the man in this coffin? He was once my best friend.’

  The kids were shocked. ‘Who is it?’ they asked.

  ‘His name was Reggie Kray,’ I said softly, ‘and he was one of the most notorious criminals of his time – or any other time. He had a twin brother called Ronnie. They were cold-blooded murderers. They ruled London by fear. I helped to bring them down. In fact I very nearly stopped them altogether.’

  ‘Dad, if you were his friend, does that mean you were a criminal too?’ one of the kids asked.

  I didn’t know how to reply. There was a long silence. Eventually my daughter said softly, ‘Dad, did you ever kill anyone?’

  ‘The opposite,’ I said. ‘I tried to save people, and I suffered for it.’

  I’d never told them a thing about who I used to be. This time, I don’t know why, it was different. I wanted to tell them a little bit more.

  ‘There was a cop who went after these people,’ I explained. ‘He was called Nipper Read. Do you know he told my mother, your grandmother, that without me it would have taken a hell of a lot longer to have nabbed the Krays and get them off the street and locked up?’

  I did not tell them that, for a time, I’d been completely in their thrall. That I’d been overwhelmed at how glamorous and powerful they seemed. How I’d left my first wife and baby daughter to be with them, how I’d carried guns for them, carried a gun myself, witnessed beatings and shootings. Like I was a Cockney version of that guy in the movie Goodfellas, the one who says: ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.’ Well, for a little while I had been a gangster. Or at least I thought I was.

  I had been a part of ‘the Firm’. Not the Kray firm, the Firm. There was only one that mattered.

  Then something had happened which changed my life forever. I saw things that terrified and disgusted me, things that I would never want anyone to know about. I had to make a stand. I did something that put my own life in deadly danger and that of my beloved brothers: Alfie, a little older than me, and David who is a little younger. They did not know at the time just what I had done. I’d had to run away from my old life and let my family think I was dead. Could it really all have happened almost fifty years ago?

  Anger and grief welled up in me. I slammed the book shut.

  Over the years I’d mastered the art of cutting off emotionally from everyone. For months, I’d only managed to stay alive at all by acting. I thought I’d been so good at it. But maybe I wasn’t any more.

  Did I really want my children to know the true story of what happened? Did I want anyone in my new life to know? My children were now well out of school. They weren’t stupid. I had long ago decided that I would have to tell them all of it when the time was right. When I had worked out what really happened and why. Well, now was the time.

  After that first shocking reminder of my past, I began to research more about the London of my youth, t
entatively drawing to the surface old memories I had supressed for years. I trawled the internet. I was astonished at how much was out there on the Krays. What was it about them that exerted such a strong grip on the public imagination, even now, forty years after the height of their reign of terror? Late into the night, I’d stay up, discovering things I never knew about them at the time. But I also came to realise that there were a lot of things that my brothers and I had witnessed that nobody else knew about – and certainly had never written about. We were part of it. We’d been there.

  This book could not have been written without the cooperation of my two brothers, Alfie and David. They were at the heart of everything and they were involved with the Krays well before I ever met them. Many of the stories contained in these pages were drawn from their detailed recollections, told to me either at the time or many years later when we were reunited. We have dug up some painful memories as we went over these events together during the course of writing this book. I have to thank them from the bottom of my heart for their support. Without them it would only be half the story.

  There had been official cover-ups. There had been myth-making and distortion on an epic scale. There were so many lies. Now it was time for the truth.

  CHAPTER 1

  LOST AND FOUND

  WHERE TO START? Right at the beginning is as good a place as anywhere. This is a story about family – about loving, losing and being found again. One of the very earliest episodes in my life was being lost. I was just a baby. I was born in Islington in north London on 23 January 1942. The war was on. In fact it had been on for two and a half years when I had my first big adventure.

  One evening during an air-raid alert the family had to go to the shelter with all the children, rushing to get in as the siren rang out. The smallest children, including me, were squeezed together into prams and pushed inside. When they did a head-count of the children inside, I was missing. My mother was frantic and screaming. A brave man went out and found me in the street and carried me to the shelter. That’s how Mum told it to me, when I was old enough to understand. I loved hearing this story, particularly the part about how overjoyed she was to have me back.

  A little later it was the time when the flying bombs were coming over London. It was just after D-Day. My first memories are of cowering inside the coal cellar on the occasions when we couldn’t get to the air-raid shelter in time. The children were put inside a kind of upturned metal table with wire mesh round it, the idea being that if a bomb hit the house, the rescuers could dig down through the rubble and perhaps save any children protected by the metal basket. We were in there plenty of times but we never got blown up. My mother was shocked when I told her I remembered that in such detail. I must have been about eighteen months old.

  Dad met Mum when she was young, about sixteen. Dad was twenty years older. He saw Mum the first time when she was riding on a London tram and hanging on to the handrail as it clattered along. She must have been very pretty. He was driving a flashy convertible, and followed the tram and waited for her to get off. That as far as I know was the first time they met. I always liked that story too.

  Dad had always been a natural showman. Just before the war they’d lived in a big, mock-Tudor house in Chingford. He’d built a greyhound-racing track in Edmonton, promoted all-in wrestling. He’d made a fortune. Dad told me that for years he’d had a chauffeur to drive him round. But by the time I was born it was all gone.

  Mum lost her first child, a girl, named little Nell. Eileen, Alfie, me and David came along soon afterwards. A few years later they also had George, Paul and Jane. So there were seven of us kids – although it was us three boys in the middle who made up the gang. We hung out together all the time.

  Dad seemed to favour me a little more than the others; at least that’s how it felt to me. I would sometimes get a beating from him with a cane. Even so I would think he still loved me. Dad would say, ‘I’ve got to do this because my dad beat me in the same way.’

  I wanted to show Dad I was brave; so one day when I was about eight years old I found a dead rat and I picked it up. I hid it behind my back and said, ‘I’m brave, you know.’ Dad looked at me curiously and said, ‘I know you are, Bobby.’ Then I showed him the dead rat I had in my hand. I was fully expecting to get praise for being so courageous. Instead I got a beating.

  I was always trying to make my dad love me even more. I always thought I wasn’t good enough to be worthy of his favour. I was going to spend a long while trying to make him proud of me. In the end it didn’t matter too much. We had it tough but not as hard as some. The tougher things got, the more solidarity there was between me and my brothers. That was the comfort. That’s what made the big separation, when it came later, so hard to bear.

  The three of us – Alfie, David and I – were always very close. As children we would sleep in the same bed almost every night. Alfie would say, ‘Witches’ trick,’ and we would all have to turn over simultaneously, our legs fitting together like a jigsaw because there was so little room in the bed. Before we went to sleep Alfie would remind us to say our prayers. This carried on right up to our early teens. When it was cold we would fill glass Tizer bottles with hot water to warm our beds.

  By now we were living in the middle of London, in Lamb’s Conduit Street, Holborn. The West End wasn’t too far away. I was learning how to survive on the streets, how to earn money – even if I got it wrong sometimes. One night I went to Russell Square tube station on Guy Fawkes Night to get a penny for the guy. It was very cold so Mum said I could put on her old fur coat. I wasn’t getting much and I was just about to go home when this American soldier came along. He said he wouldn’t give me anything for the guy but he would give me five shillings for the coat. It seemed like a good deal to me so I sold it, and ran home to give Mum the money. Well, she was not exactly pleased. She went out looking for the American but never did find him or the coat. It must have been worth a lot more than what I got for it. Mum never did tell Dad. I would have got a good beating if he had found out.

  St Joseph’s Roman Catholic was the first school I went to. It was on Macklin Street next to Covent Garden Market, and it was run by nuns. The nuns would give my brothers and me the cane when we were late, but I soon worked out a strategy to avoid this. I would pick up some flowers out of the market dust-bins that still had some life in them and take them to the nuns to get their blessing. ‘My child, how kind and thoughtful of you,’ Sister Camilla or Sister Dominique would say to me, instead of punishing me for being late. But this kind of trick only got me so far. I never shone at school – I was always put at the back of the classroom so I was out of the way, especially when dignitaries came in to observe us. The clever girls were put up front. I hated the place. I didn’t really learn to read, write, spell or even speak properly while I was there.

  Then one day we discovered that Dad had another family living in Westcliff-on-Sea near Southend. He couldn’t keep it hidden. We just heard Mum shouting: ‘Go on then, you’re always going off to see her.’ It was the cause of a lot of argument between Mum and Dad. No surprise there. His other wife’s name was Alice. He had other children although I still don’t know how many. For some reason, I don’t remember this bothering me too much. As long as he loved Mum and us best, and I believed he did, I didn’t care.

  Dad had lost everything after the war so he would duck and dive to get by. He was always into diamonds in a small way, but no one really knew what he was up to, not even us. Because Dad’s attentions were divided and we always needed money, Mum would take in costume jewellery and we would glue cheap glass ‘diamonds’ on pieces to sell. We would all help out any way we could. In the summer we would go hop-picking in Kent. Six weeks working the hop fields and sleeping in wooden sheds.

  As I grew up I continued to come up with new ways to help the family finances – as long as it didn’t involve too much hard work. Alfie and David would do the same. There was a sense of ‘all for one and one for all’ in our little ga
ng. We’d look out for each other whatever happened. I used to think I’d never keep a secret from my brothers. They’d know anyway, instinctively, I believed. Though of course one day that would all change.

  But as kids, my brothers and I were all in it together. We would get rags, paper and cardboard and sell them to a man who would give us cash to help the family out. Sometimes we used the money to fund our escapades. More as an adventure than protest, we ran away from home when I was about twelve and got as far as Southend. We loved the Kursaal fairground, the sea and especially the big rock-candy sweets. Another time it was Epping Forest, always a big draw; climbing trees, getting lost… We would catch the Number 38 bus that took you right into the countryside and then all the way back to Holborn. That little jaunt got us a good beating off Dad.

  By now I’d got a taste for wheeling and dealing and was getting much better at it. The street markets of the East End were the big draw. I would go down Petticoat Lane and Club Row with all the pets, pulling a pram-wheeled homemade cart loaded with junk – old clocks and gramophones and the like. I was about eleven years old at the time. The family tried to stop me because I would leave at five on a Sunday morning, rain or shine. The streets would be empty but I needed to get a good pitch and I knew that Mum needed the money.

  Meanwhile I had started at Sir William Collins secondary modern school in Somers Town. I didn’t last long. I couldn’t stand it, and would just play truant. Alfie, David and I spent a lot of time playing in the bombed-out ruins when we should have been in class. The middle of London was still a big bomb-site. Everything was grey and brown and colourless and there was still rationing, although people were so poor it didn’t make any difference. When I was eleven there was big street party for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Some people even watched it on the television, a novelty in those days.