by Bobby Teale
Now it truly was time for me to leave. I looked at the faces in the car and wondered again: ‘What the fuck have I got myself into?’
Joe Pogue gave me a number to memorise so that I could call at anytime. ‘Stay in touch,’ he said. I left the car and walked back to Fleet Street with a few men standing on both sides of the street just looking at me.
I kept my head down and moved as fast as I could without running. I felt the men on the street were trying to see my face. I knew, or thought I did, that the Krays had paid informers within the police – but had no idea how high they went. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t hide. I’d crossed the line. And now I must go back into the jaws of it and most probably get myself killed. I was in a daze.
I got a bus going towards Islington but needed more time, so I got off and started walking. Then I got a cab to Stoke Newington, got out in the High Road and walked the rest of the way to Moresby Road. I thought I was being watched all the way.
I finally got to the door of my brother’s flat. I couldn’t see a soul around. I tapped on the window and a face peeked out so fast I didn’t see who it was. The door was opened by Christine, who didn’t say a word but gave me a look of utter helplessness. In I went. The place stank of booze, smoke and sweat. After being out in the fresh air, I wanted to get out again straight away. But I knew I couldn’t. I was back in it. I would have to stay in it. Surely they must know.
And there’s Ronnie, sitting in one of David’s chairs: ‘Hello Bobby, had a nice little outing have you? How’s your mum?’
CHAPTER 11
MORESBY ROAD – AND A TRIP TO DARTMOOR
SO NOW THE Firm are all holed up in a tiny flat with women and children as their protection. My brother David was perhaps the most terrified of all of us. His family was so caught up in it, how could he not be?
After my meeting with Butler it quickly became apparent that the police were watching us. There was a garden at the back of David’s flat and the Old Bill were by now all round us. One day a copper casually knocked on the front door to ask David if his wife and family were all right, as if he were just passing. Ronnie was in the bath while this was going on. He was always in the bath at David’s place as he didn’t have one at home. But when David asked Ronnie what we were going to do, he just said: ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He was so confident, so sure that they wouldn’t come in if David’s wife and the children were there.
There was still a lot of coming and going. The twins needed to know who’d been in the Beggar that night, who’d seen Ronnie, who was saying what to who, who to put the frighteners on. They needed information. And there were policeman in their pay who’d tell them all of that.
David had to go out for food and fags. One time he and Christine went down to the shops in Upper Clapton Road with one of their children, and passed a policeman standing outside in the street. He nodded in recognition at them, smiling and asking how they were. They just nodded and smiled back at him before going back to the flat. There were always one or two of the Firm staring at us too. Then there would always be one or two police at the shops pretending they were buying cigarettes. What would we do if they got an order to come in after us?
On the fourth or fifth night there was a knock at the front door. When that happened, we were always told to get away from it and go in the kitchen. This time it’s a copper. So Christine has to open it. Ronnie and Reggie and the rest of them were all in the front room, ready for a shoot-out. Someone had a shotgun loaded and ready – there were plenty of guns. Ronnie started gesturing at Christine to get rid of him. The policeman told Christine that they’d heard there’d been a robbery in the area and was just checking up that everyone was safe. ‘You all right?’ he asked Christine. Christine must have been terrified but answered, ‘Yes, I’m all right. Everything’s fine.’ It was like something from a film.
The policeman said: ‘Well, we’ve had a report, but as long as you’re OK, I guess that’s it.’
Once the policeman had gone, Christine started to break down, sobbing and crying, begging David to do something, get them out of it. But David was in an impossible position. What do you tell your wife if the Kray Firm decides to come round for tea?
I really felt for David. His wife Christine was a happy, sociable girl who really loved taking care of the kids. Diane was about two and walking, and Joanne was one and still in a pushchair. Christine would not let liberties be taken and not surprisingly she was constantly on at David to discover when the Krays would be leaving. Most people have that sort of row about the in-laws at Christmas, not about having their two-room flat full of armed villains.
She didn’t know at first that there’d been a shooting, although she must have had a pretty good idea after a few days of all this. David had given her some old guff about the police trying to pin it on the twins but she’d have seen through that, I’m sure. And so it went on. I heard them arguing through the thin walls of their bedroom. If David was a real man, she would say, why couldn’t he just get rid of them? I felt for my brother and was impressed by Christine’s courage. She wasn’t afraid of them, that’s for sure. That’s the sort of woman she was.
David at last told Ron, ‘Look, you just can’t stay here.’ He begged him. ‘Ron, Ron, Ron, don’t do this to me!’ But he wouldn’t listen. The Firm holed up in David’s flat for the next two weeks, with people coming and going all the while. Occasionally Ronnie would send someone out to buy toys for the children, trying to make him look like he was all heart. Alfie was sent out more times to buy the drink.
Ronnie drank crates and crates of brown ale. Reggie liked a gin and tonic too. There were clouds of cigarette smoke all the time. One night Nobby Clark brought Violet Kray over with some shirts for Ron. She said she was very worried about him, and Ron told her, ‘I didn’t do Cornell, Mum, but they are trying to fit me up, the Old Bill.’ Violet said someone had been round and smashed their windows. We found out later it was Cornell’s widow, Olive. Mrs Kray was there for about an hour, and then they took her home.
Ronnie’s doctor came to give him some drug or other, and gave Christine and some of the Firm some tranquillisers as well. The strange thing was Ronnie seemed to be in his element, enjoying every moment of it. There were moments of hilarity and moments of terror. We could even go out to the shops, or to visit our families. But not all together. And of course, no one was allowed do a runner.
We used to go out to pubs as well, not the Grave Maurice or Madge’s, not for the first few days at least, but pubs in Stoke Newington. There was a social club in the Lebus furniture factory in Ferry Lane in Tottenham where they had boxing nights and we’d sometimes go there.
Occasionally Ronnie and Reggie would start whispering to one another about ‘getting a few quid’ to this or that officer in Scotland Yard or the East End nicks. It soon became clear to me that not only did the police know where the Krays were almost from the beginning but that the twins were actually passing and getting information from the Old Bill, with members of the Firm going in and out as the message boys. The campaign to keep any witnesses quiet was working. It was starting to look like they were going to get away with it.
Ronnie actually left for a couple of nights – only to come back to David’s two days later, telling us that he ‘felt safe here’. Presumably a police informer had told him that he was.
Meanwhile I had made my offer to Butler. Now the squeeze was really on. I was suddenly the Yard’s best hope of bringing down the Krays. Me, Bobby Teale. I didn’t know it yet but perhaps I was their only hope. Their demands began right after I’d first made contact.
It was clear to me that the police knew perfectly well it was Ronnie who’d gone into the Blind Beggar and done Cornell. But they did not know who the other man was – who had fired into the ceiling. If they could get to him they could get to Ronnie.
As I would hear it pretty soon it from Pogue, two witnesses to the shooting (who’d been in the Beggar when it happened) had gone into Arbour Square Police Station in Stepney and told
the Old Bill exactly who had done it. They had told them it was Ronnie Kray on 12 March, three nights into the siege of Bobby’s flat – and when I’d first told Butler where they all were.
Everyone knew it was Ronnie. But there was no one brave enough to say that in a statement that could be used in court. The other man in the Beggar was still a mystery. He was said to have ‘scars, similar to scald marks on his face and hands’. He might have had a Scots accent. Well, I knew it was Scotch Ian Barrie. I told Pogue that. You could not mistake him.
There were plenty of pictures of Ronnie, of course. But Mr Butler needed a photograph of this other man, so Pogue told me. So what was I supposed to do – get out a camera and ask Scotch Ian to smile?
It happened like this. I saw a picture of Ian Barrie among a stack of photos belonging to Reggie on the table in David’s flat. Reggie was looking through a pile of them for some reason. It was common for the twins to have a stack of prints with them wherever they were. They had suitcases full of them, taken in clubs, in pubs, with celebrities, with boxers, with the Firm. They lived for their image.
This lot of snaps had come over after some errand to Vallance Road. I think Billy Exley brought them. Poor old Billy was going backwards and forwards with the twins’ washing. So I waited until Reg was out of the room and I took a full-size photo of Ian Barrie out of the stack and slid it into my jacket. It showed him standing outside the house of a mate of theirs, a bookmaker called Charlie Clark, and it had been taken recently.
Needless to say, doing this was a huge risk. But Butler had asked me to do it so I did. Remember that at this point I believed that he was going to come and rescue my family at any moment. I arranged a meeting with Pogue to hand it over by phoning a particular number from a call box. I’d got out of the flat again by saying I was going to visit my mum. Mum was getting a lot of visits. I gave the picture to Pogue at our next meeting. He just sort of grunted. ‘We’ll need more than this,’ he said.
Certain times I would be told to phone back, or phone a different number at a special time. It was absolutely terrifying.
The actual meet would be in an unmarked car, which would pick me up in some side street. They told me to keep my head down. We would be driving around as we talked. The conversations were recorded on tape, though at times I had my suspicions that one of the police sitting in the front of the car would turn off the tape recorder at crucial moments.
Sometimes Pogue would sit next to me in the back, and other times he would be sitting in the front asking me questions. Sometimes there were even two officers sitting in the back of the car on either side of me. At no time did I ever sit in the front. Maybe they thought I was going to suddenly jump out.
On one of these meets – and I guess there were around three times when I could get out of the flat during those terrifying two weeks – I was telling Pogue how Ronnie had been trying to get my little brother into bed. I said that I was on the verge of shooting him. At this, Pogue interrupted me to ask what kind of gun I had. As soon as I started to speak the copper in the front started to fiddle with the tape. They didn’t want this bit recorded.
I said I had a nine millimetre, at which Pogue said: ‘Well, we need you to use a Luger.’
He then turned to the other officers and asked: ‘Have we got an old Luger lying around anywhere?’
At this point I had no idea what they were really up to. Perhaps they had it in their minds to genuinely explore whether I would be willing to kill Ronnie Kray for them and so avoid the bother of bringing him to trial. Although, whether they would have had me go through with it, had I been willing, I had no idea. Alternatively, it occurred to me that they may have been testing to see whether I was a genuine gangster. I had told them that I was on the edge of the Firm and not part of their criminality. I wondered whether they believed me.
Had I said yes to that Luger then I would have shown them I was as bad as the Krays. Obviously, I said ‘no’. But I have wondered to this day what was really going on when they made that offer and what would have happened had I said ‘yes’.
Only one man in the Yard took me to one side and warned me against going down this path – although of course it was never spelled out in so many words. He told me I would ‘be fished out of the Thames in pieces’.
And all the time I’m trying to stay calm. I knew my life was hanging by a thread. I was terrified that I was going to be exposed at any moment. And what if those stories about the Krays having police informers were true?
It didn’t take me long to find out. A few days after I passed the Barrie photograph to Butler, with the twins and half the Firm still holed up in Moresby Road, I left the flat to go out with Reggie on a meet. It was pretty terrifying. Here I was trying to get information to the police about what’s really going on – and I’ve got to look as if it’s business as usual with my best friend Reggie.
Suddenly he tells me he had just got word from what he called ‘his man in the Yard’ that ‘the Old Bill have got David’s address and have the whole place under surveillance… So we will have to move.’
Well, that was one way of getting these psychotic killers out of my brother’s flat. But it did not help me much. I had crossed the line. I had told the police directly that Ronnie Kray had killed Cornell. And now Reggie had told me they were getting inside information. What do I do? I had no choice. I had to play along. That’s what Alfie and David were doing. Like me, they had to. Look at what Alfie did for Ron after just a few days.
As the time passed in the flat, Alfie hadn’t been caught up in the events as much as David had been. Alfie was there the first couple of nights, and then he said to Ronnie he had to go back to Wendy and the boys.
Ronnie told him, ‘Make sure you come back tomorrow night, and that you don’t say a word to anyone.’ So Alfie didn’t tell Wendy the Krays had done Cornell, just that the police suspected them.
After that Alfie came over to David’s place to bring drink and food, whatever they needed. So even before it ended, he was back to doing more or less what he’d always been doing. Running errands. Part of that was for the ‘Away Society’.
A part of the big-hearted Kray myth was that they would do little favours for villains who’d been put away. The Krays would go round to see their families and give them some money, weekly or fortnightly, whatever they could. Alfie, David – or once or twice it was me, Bobby – would be told: ‘Go round to see soand-so’s wife and give her this for herself and the kids – make sure they know where it came from.’ It was all part of the propaganda.
But now Ronnie had a bigger plan – a real spectacular.
A week or so after the Cornell murder – it was 20 March 1966, as Alfie would state later at the Old Bailey trial – Ronnie and Alfie were in the Grave Maurice and Ron told him, ‘We’re going to give you a driver to go down to Dartmoor and visit a friend. We want you to tell him we’ll get him out if we can’t get a date for his release from the Home Secretary.’
Well, the friend turned out to be Frankie Mitchell. He was a legend. Alfie had never met him – none of us had as he’d been inside so much. But he’d heard of him, everybody had. He was the ‘Mad Axe-Man’ detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure at Dartmoor Prison with no date for release.
Alfie told me a bit about Frankie’s background. He’d started his career of crime stealing bottles of milk as a kid, and wound up going to approved school. He was strong and big and caused mayhem in there, so afterwards he got taken straight to Borstal. From there he went to YP – young people’s prison – and then he graduated pretty quickly to the great and gruesome Wandsworth. He ended up getting eighteen years for violence.
It was Frankie Mitchell who started the famous Wandsworth riot in 1954, after smashing a projector up into the air in the hall during a Saturday afternoon film show that had been put on for the prisoners. Afterwards he broke out of another jail and eventually got put away again, earning himself the nickname of the ‘Mad Axe-Man’ in the process. The newspapers called him that
after he was done for threatening an elderly couple while on the run from a hospital for the criminally insane.
He was a big man, so strong he became a legend. But he had low intelligence and at heart he was like a puppy.
Ronnie had met Frankie in Wandsworth Prison and had befriended him. He could be quite sentimental like that. He promised to help him after he came out. But it looked like Frankie was never coming out.
So Ronnie had decided he had to do something about Frank Mitchell. He would start a campaign to get him released, make a noise, show what a big man he was by getting the government to do something.
Mad Teddy Smith would be the one who would write all the letters to the newspapers and the Home Office. My brothers thought the whole thing was Mad Teddy’s idea to get some good propaganda after the Cornell killing. Most of London’s villains thought Ronnie was out of order after the Blind Beggar incident, although they wouldn’t dare say it. Perhaps Ron believed this would be a way of salvaging his reputation amongst them.
So now he wanted Alfie to go down to Dartmoor and sort of bump into Frankie Mitchell. Two of the Firm, Tommy Cowley and Wally Garelick, had already been to see Mitchell a little before he did.
Alfie couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
‘You want me to plan Frank Mitchell’s escape?’ he asked Ron.
‘Well, yes. If we don’t get him a date for a release, then you’ll be the one to go down and get him out and fetch him back to London,’ said Ronnie.
So it’s down to Alfie to go and see Frankie and tell him what the twins have got in mind. He would go with Fat Wally Garelick, who was a minicab driver in his normal life. They would go there in his Rover 3-litre, and they were to leave that same night.
So early the next morning, 21 March, they set off. Almost immediately, they got pulled by the police on the way to Dartmoor. ‘Who are you and where are you going?’ they demanded. Maybe the police were watching them all along.