by Bobby Teale
We got to the forest. The sky was overcast. There was absolutely no one around. No families, no picnickers. When we got to a spot in the middle of the woods, Reggie stopped the car and turned to me and said, ‘Get out and give me a hand.’
So I got out. Turns out Reggie did have a gun. Of course he did. He threw a bottle in the air and started shooting at it. He told me to go and look for a bag in the trees with some money in it. It was evidently a ploy to get me in front of him and make me an easy target. I ran into the trees but he was not shooting at me at first. Then he asked me to pick up the bottle and hold it as a target. I kept running. Then he’s firing in my direction and he’s shouting, ‘Stand still!’ The gun may have been a .22 because it was not very loud. Or he may have had a silencer.
I got to the other side of the car and thought I would use the car to hide behind. By now it appeared to me that Reggie was pretty high on pills.
He started screaming at me: ‘I promise not to hit you! I just need target practice. You know I’m your best friend…’
He’d stopped shooting now. Perhaps he needed to reload. He couldn’t see me but kept on yelling for me to come back. ‘Come on out, we’ve got to go.’ I knew then for certain that he was going to kill me.
I didn’t trust him not to trick me. He started the car and let it run but I still didn’t come out of hiding. Finally he shouted, ‘I’m leaving!’ and I heard the noise of the engine fade away. I waited about a half hour because I thought he might have driven a few feet away and walked back to wait for me to come out of the woods. When I did leave the forest, I circled around and came out at a different point on the road. My knees were shaking.
I thought I’d had it, whatever kind of escape I might have just pulled off. I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. It wasn’t even a warning off. They must have known it was me. Tell me I could not still be getting away with it. My friend Reggie Kray had been sent by Ronnie to take me out to the forest and kill me. Then he couldn’t shoot straight. There would be no second chance.
I thought seriously of contacting Pogue at the Yard and trying to get some sort of immediate protection. But right then I decided not to. I knew that all the information I was giving was getting back to the Krays somehow. So I realised that if this story got back to them and no one else knew about the Epping Forest episode but me and Reggie, I would have been exposed as the real ‘Phillips’.
No, there was no way I could trust the police, any more than I could trust the Krays. It was the Old Bill who had put the smokescreen up about Frosty being the informer. It was their idea of justice to get Frosty under suspicion by the Krays – it was not done just to protect me. So what else were the police capable of? Offering me up for sacrifice?
First I thought I’d go to Steeple Bay in Essex to David’s caravan. I knew Christine and the kids were already down there.
Ronnie had already made a move against me at Steeple Bay earlier that summer. It was one of his little impulses. The old boxer Billy Exley had been with us. Ronnie said it was a lovely day and we should go for a lovely walk. We got to a gravel pit. It was raining, grey and cloudy. Billy and I could both tell that Ronnie had something bad on his mind.
So, as Ronnie started walking down the slope, I just kept walking along the top with Billy going ahead of me. Ronnie went down into the big gravel pit and was just standing there saying to me: ‘Come on down, Bobby, it’s nice.’
I could see Ronnie was thinking that this was a great place to kill someone. I could practically read his mind. No one was around. I mean not a soul, apart from us. I knew Ronnie liked to get his victim in an arm lock around his neck until he passed out and then he would just use a jerking motion to break his neck. So when he shouted to me and said, ‘It’s beautiful down here, come on down,’ I just said, ‘No thanks. I’ve got to see someone.’
Then he shouted to Billy, standing at the top of the pit. ‘Get a hold of Bobby and bring him down to me,’ he yelled, then turning to me he said, ‘It’s nice down here,’ in a very friendly tone. I was standing about a hundred feet away from Billy Exley and I could see he wasn’t that keen on getting me down the slope. Billy was not in good enough health to do much. He’d already had a couple of heart attacks. I just walked, keeping a look over my shoulder, and made my way back to the relative safety of David’s caravan. Luckily, Ronnie didn’t try anything else on with me for the rest of our stay.
So going to Steeple Bay again looks like a very stupid idea. I was getting to the stage of total exhaustion. I couldn’t think straight. In the end I didn’t. I found somewhere else to go, staying in London and lying low.
I can only imagine what Reggie told Ronnie when he got back from Epping. Ron had been raving at him ever since Cornell to do one for himself. He meant kill me. And Reggie couldn’t. So Ronnie sent Ronnie Hart (the Krays’ cousin) and Frosty to Steeple Bay to find me – although what would happen next was pretty obvious – because they thought that’s where I’d run to. I know that for a fact. They got there late that same Sunday night that Reggie came back from the forest having failed to finish the job.
Maybe it was a test of Frosty’s loyalty, to help work out if he was the informant or not. Chris, David’s wife, God bless her, would tell me later that they’d come down that night and searched all over the caravan – in the cupboards and under the trailer – and wanted to know when she had last seen me. They were not exactly polite about it. She told them she had not seen me for a few days. They were searching outside in the darkness calling my name: ‘Bobby! Bobby!’ Christine said she thought they were going to beat her up. Then they left.
But in the end it was Frosty who got it. The Yard’s plan came good. When Ronnie heard again via the Yard informer that it was Frosty who was the grass, Ronnie killed him. I heard it from someone you should know. I furthermore think he was killed to send me a message. Ronnie Kray tortured him to death, poor bastard, trying to get him to tell them what he had told the police. And he’d told them nothing. He just screamed for mercy. His body was never found.
But Reggie knew it was me all along, I’m sure of that. It was just that that day in Epping he couldn’t quite go through with it. He wasn’t quite ready to kill me or anyone else, although he would be soon enough.
CHAPTER 15
THE SET-UP
I HAD NO choice. I couldn’t face it out any longer. I went through the request for a meeting procedure with a call from a phone box to the number I’d been given. It all happened pretty fast. This time it wasn’t Pogue but a detective I think had been in the car on one of our little tape-recorded sessions. He told me to call him ‘Dan’. It must have been Monday 8 August, the day after the drive to Epping with Reggie and the search for me at the caravan later that night.
I’d given Pogue and Butler the works. I’d told them what had happened the night of the Cornell shooting, about the mayhem at Moresby Road, Reggie’s increasing blood-lust and Ronnie inciting him to kill. I’d told them about Bobby Cannon’s escape at Blonde Vicky’s and the shooting at the Regency Club. I’d given them the make on Scotch Ian Barrie, the second gunman in the Beggar. I’d even got them a photograph. I’d given them the Lea Bridge Road address and told them when to hit it. And then the great Tommy Butler had blown it.
So this new guy tells me that they have to get even more evidence on the Krays. It’s going to take them at least six months to get it. Well, I’d be dead long before then. But the Yard also now has good information that I am going to be killed, he tells me. I know that, I say. They reckon it’s not because the twins had found out I was the informer but because I had stopped a murder, the Bobby Cannon business.
Either way I knew too much. I was in the way. They said my two brothers, Alfie and David, were also in the same danger. All of us would have to be taken off the streets.
I asked this man from the Yard, Dan, whatever he called himself, what we should do. There were families involved, there were children. He said, ‘We can’t put you all into hiding as it will tip off t
he twins.’
When I’d begun all this back in March, I thought it would end in a matter of days. I really believed that the police would get them, roll up the Firm and we’d all be safe. We were the good guys. Now it had gone from days to weeks to months and nobody had been arrested. This same Yard man, Dan, told me: ‘Say absolutely nothing to Alfie or David or they will panic. I will handle it. Leave it all to me, and don’t worry, it’s all under control and it will all be taken care of. Just remember, whatever happens, go along with it and don’t say a word to a soul.’
In the meantime there’d been the trip to the Forest. I hadn’t told the police about it (although there was a good chance they had had us all under surveillance). Only Reggie and I knew, and almost certainly Ronnie, so if anything got back about that, they would know that the informer in the Firm had to be me. Except that they knew that already, they had to.
So the Yard had to have some kind of plan to bring me in to safety. I didn’t have a clue what it was until I found out the hard way. Alfie and David would find out too. They were not going to be happy about it. It happened like this.
A few weeks before, I’d been on my own having a drink in a bar in Mayfair (I think it was actually called ‘The May-Fair’). It was late in June or early July. I was standing at one end of the bar. A man in his forties came up to me. I don’t know if he was already in the bar or he just came in. No one else was at the bar and he came and stood next to me.
He started talking about how cold it was outside for this time of the year. He ordered a drink. I was just about ready to leave and was finishing off the last of my drink when he asked me if he could buy me another. It was a set-up.
I thought for a moment and then I said, ‘Yes, OK, thanks.’ I told him I was a street trader and mentioned a pitch I was looking at to buy with my two brothers in Chapel Market, Islington.
He said he was interested in making a small investment and he would think it over. I should have picked up on it straight away but I didn’t. This was the start of the big move to bring us in. After we’d had another drink, he told me he was doing work for the government but he would not elaborate and said no more on the subject.
I met him several times again afterwards and even borrowed his car. He told me his name was Wallace. I asked him, ‘Is that your first or last name?’
He said, ‘Just call me Wallace.’ And so I did. He lent me his car, a convertible Triumph TR3. I’d got it crammed with partygoers one night when the police nicked me. I had eleven people in the car and everyone ran off and I got caught. As I was trying to get away, I pushed the copper and that was that. When it came to court later the judge said it was not possible to get eleven people in a small car like that. I got done for obstructing the police and assault. It didn’t help.
But Wallace wasn’t put off by this little adventure, in fact quite the opposite. After the Lea Bridge Road arrest and the ID parade cock-up, after Epping, I started thinking he was as safe company as any. Maybe he could help Alfie and David as well. They still didn’t have a real clue of the danger they were in.
So I was having a drink with this Wallace and he said: ‘Why don’t you bring your brothers over and we will have a party back at my flat?’ He added, ‘I like to party.’
I got a message out to the Yard to say we were all at this address and we weren’t going anywhere. If they were going to bring the three of us in, they should do it now. Well, it didn’t happen quite how I expected.
I knew what was happening, or thought I did. My brothers didn’t have a clue and wouldn’t for years to come. This was the hardest part of all of it.
I had told David and Alfie about my new friend, Wallace, and had said he might be interested in giving us a loan. So we all went down the West End one night, taking in a few pubs with Wallace, before eventually going back to his flat. It was in Dolphin Square on the Thames Embankment. We talked to him about our life as street traders and he told us working-class people like us were the ‘salt of the earth’. That sort of thing. We were all quite drunk by this stage of the evening and when we told him about the stall we wanted he said: ‘I might be able to help.’
I offered to write him a receipt for the nine hundred pounds confirming that we would repay it within a month. By now it was one in the morning, so Wallace asked us if we’d like to stay the night. Alfie slept on the small sofa while David claimed the big one and I slept on the floor. Wallace was clearly gay but there were no sexual undertones – he didn’t try anything and we didn’t think anything about it.
Well, about seven thirty the next morning, the doorbell goes. I can’t remember who opened the door, but it wasn’t Wallace. He wasn’t even in the flat. In marched six plain-clothes policemen – with Wallace behind them.
Wallace was blustering and claiming that he’d left in the middle of the night via the rubbish chute because we had been ‘holding him hostage’. We had all woken with raging hangovers so Alfie volunteered to make tea for us all. It was funny really, at the time, the coppers drinking tea and Wallace going on about how we’d demanded money from him. What a load of nonsense! It was a joke.
The police were distinctly unamused, however. They said they were going to take us to Rochester Row Police Station. David and Alfie kept saying, ‘I can’t believe this,’ but I was beginning to have an idea what was really happening. We were separated and put into three different cells. We were then brought in, one by one, to be interviewed. Subsequently we were charged with ‘demanding money with menaces’, booked by a police sergeant, and then carted off to Bow Street Magistrate’s Court the next day, still looking at one another in a daze. I could see Alfie and David were wondering what the hell was going on. I wasn’t sure myself.
It was barely a week since I’d told Butler where and when to hit the twins. Now the three of us were under arrest. I could not tell Alfie and David what this was really all about – but I assumed this was all part of the rescue plan that ‘Dan’ had promised. I believed we’d get a few months in prison, say nine months maximum, just to keep us safely out of the way while they took the Krays down.
I had been told that I was going to be brought in, but I had no idea that meeting ‘Wallace’ was going to be done the way it was. Who was he really? He’d been around for a little while by now in that long dangerous summer, and his flat was somewhere I felt safe, somewhere I could lie low. It was where I’d gone after the Sunday outing to Epping, the day the Firm had come looking for me at Steeple Bay.
It all got very strange very quickly. We couldn’t get bail for this ridiculous ‘blackmail’ charge – even though it was all on the say-so of this one guy. That was confirmation to me that it was a fit-up.
At first it was quite reassuring. It was as if some hidden hand was moving to protect the three of us by getting us off the streets – just as I’d been promised. But the wives and kids were still on the outside, what about them? What about our mother? I thought about my little brother Paul and my little sister Jane. What if the Krays got their hands on them? I had risked my life and my family’s on a promise from Butler and Pogue and then discovered there was someone at the Yard leaking it all back to the twins.
The idea of the three of us getting a sentence of nine months maximum, as the Yard had told me, was fading fast. So who could I really trust? I told the arresting officer from my cell to get in touch with Pogue at the Yard but I was told he would not come to talk to me. I know he got my message though because I got one back from him a bit later: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch soon.’
Now I was afraid of the police more than the Krays. I had seen the way they worked during the time I was getting them information. They had contrived Frosty’s horrible end. They could be as ruthless as anyone.
And the worst thing of all was I couldn’t tell Alfie and David why it was happening, why they’d been arrested. They had no clue about Phillips or Pogue, any of it. ‘Dan’ had told me, ‘Don’t say a word.’ I still clung to that command – still hanging on to a fragment of trus
t. I was wrong about that, too.
I felt for my brothers, bewildered, betrayed, accused of something ridiculous and demeaning.
All three of us were put up at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and charged with demanding money with menaces – the formal term for blackmail. We were all remanded in custody and sent to Brixton Prison. It was 10 August. It was so crowded in the jail at that time that there were people sleeping in the corridors, and even in the chapel. We were going to be there for the next eight weeks.
We were then told we were being provided with a legal aid solicitor, only one between the three of us. The solicitor claimed that as we were all on the same charge we only needed one legal representative. Alfie questioned this, but at the time he was so convinced that the charge was going to be dismissed that he just let it go without insisting on a separate brief for each of us.
At the end of the eight weeks, our brief arrived in Brixton to tell us that our trial had been set for Number One Court at the Old Bailey. We were appalled. Number One Court was usually reserved for the worst criminals.
The trial was strange right at the start. On the first day the judge walked in and said: ‘Before we begin today, a very serious allegation has been made to me in my Chambers by a reliable source that one or two members of the jury have been approached. Now in cases of blackmail, people do get approached. I am going to ask you one at a time to stand up and to tell me if you have been approached.’
One by one the jurors denied having been threatened. So the judge then instructed them to ‘wipe this from your minds and continue with the trial’. We had been branded as jury nobblers, real villains. What the judge should have done after making such an allegation was to dismiss the jury and start again. There should have been a retrial on those grounds alone. But there wasn’t. We were already guilty. I called our brief over to complain. But all he said was: ‘Don’t do anything yet.’ Back in Brixton we arrived to a freezing cold dinner. It looked grim.