Bringing Down the Krays

by Bobby Teale

  The next day the geezer I know as ‘Wallace’ is put in the witness box, and referred to as ‘Mr X’. He was asked whether we had demanded money with menaces. He replied, ‘No.’ The prosecution then asked him whether we had tried to blackmail him. Again he said, ‘No.’ When he was asked why he had made the accusation against us, he finally answered: ‘I was frightened.’ It would be enough to put us away.

  We were sent back to Brixton each night during the trial and I tried to keep as far away from Alfie and David as possible. What was I supposed to tell them?

  Two weeks later we came to the judge’s summing up. It was relentless. Our defence offered nothing by way of explanation or excuse, and we were found guilty. Up in the gallery I looked up to see our mother’s face as she watched three of her sons sent down. David’s wife Christine was also there along with Alfie’s wife, Wendy.

  When it came to sentencing we listened in horror to the judge’s words. ‘I am sending you to prison for three years. Take them down.’

  The screws said: ‘You two, David and Bobby Teale, in this cell. Alfie Teale in the other.’

  We gripped one another’s shoulders and sang ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. The screws actually clapped. It was the last Alfie would see of me and David for two years. He told me later he went back into the cell and cried his eyes out.

  Alfie was taken by van that afternoon from the Old Bailey to go to Wandsworth to start his sentence. It was 4 October 1966. Because David and I were first-timers, we were sent to the less hard-line Wormwood Scrubs. After we were reunited, many years afterwards, Alfie told me what happened once he’d transferred to his new prison:

  When I got to Wandsworth early that evening I was put into a cell with two black guys who were up for most of the night playing chess. The cell was flooded with moonlight so I could see them very clearly. They kept asking me to join in but I was in no mood to play anything. The next morning we came out of the cell to ‘slop out’. There were no toilets in the cell so we had to use a bucket.

  Almost immediately I met up with an old friend called Mickey who’d just been given five years, closely followed by an Italian face I remembered from around Holborn who told me he’d got twelve. All of a sudden, my three didn’t seem so bad.

  At the time, Wandsworth was the strictest prison in the country. I didn’t know the rules. It turned out that if you stepped across a white line you weren’t supposed to cross, the heavy mob would blow a whistle, come running across the room and start smashing into you. I did this on my first day.

  Your dinner was a tin bowl of soup, with duff and custard to follow. Often by the time you got to the hot plate to collect your dinner, it was all mixed up together. Even a dog wouldn’t have eaten it.

  I stayed there for about a month when I was told I was being allocated to Lewes Prison. Shortly after I arrived at Lewes I was approached by an extremely well-spoken man. ‘Hello, Alfred, I’m Gerry Glendenning. I know your mother and father. So lovely to see you… When you’ve settled in, pop down to my cell, number 61, and I’ll give you a little welcome present.’ I didn’t know him, but curious about his strange invitation I went down a few hours later and knocked on his cell door. Gerry opened the door, lifted up the mattress and said, ‘What do you care for? Brandy, Scotch, rum, vodka? You’ll be right as ninepence here. Like Butlin’s, it is.’

  And he was right. In comparison to Wandsworth, Lewes was like a holiday camp.

  But I couldn’t understand why I was in a cell with a twenty-four-hour light on that was used for prisoners who were under special watch. The only reason I could possibly come up with was that it must have something to do with the twins – but just how I couldn’t understand.

  CHAPTER 16

  DAVID’S STORY

  DAVID WAS SENT first to Wormwood Scrubs, then to Maidstone where I myself was going to end up. And the Krays? While we were having our little ‘blackmail’ adventure with the law, the word was they’d flown off to Tangier in Morocco to live it up in the sun with the old villain, Billy Hill, and his wife Gipsy. They’d got out of the country on a private plane. Ronnie would have plenty of boys to entertain him there. Scotch Ian went with them. God knows what he made of it.

  After a while the authorities would boot them out of the country but they still didn’t get nicked. We were going somewhere less sunny. I’ll let David recount in his own words what happened to him:

  After the Old Bailey verdict and sentencing, a prison officer came in and told Bobby and I that we were going to Wormwood Scrubs. I remember looking out of the prison van through the tiny windows, knowing the route through Holborn and recognising the streets I’d grown up on.

  We got into the Scrubs at about seven at night. We were told to take off our clothes, put our belongings into boxes and put on the prison suits. It was very busy, with everyone jostling and being sent off in different directions. I remember looking at Bobby, as if to say ‘this is awful’, and he looked back at me as if to agree. It was horrible, like a bad dream I couldn’t wake from.

  The next day we saw the governor who allocated us jobs and gave us a release date, in two years’ time, calculated on the length of time we’d been held in remand, and on condition that we behaved ourselves. After this our wives were allowed to visit us briefly. About a month into our sentence we were then told we were being transferred to Maidstone Prison.

  It was the same old routine when we got to Maidstone. Our building was called ‘Thanet,’ a new high-security block of thirty cells, and we had light bulbs on in our rooms all night. When I protested about this and asked them to turn it off, the officers told us it was high security and asked me how long I was in for.

  I replied, ‘A lagging – got carpet for three years.’

  The officer seemed puzzled. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing in here then. This is for lifers…’

  Christine used to come up and visit me. I’d ask my friends to write letters to her for me. Around this time Christine gave birth to our third daughter. Hearing this, some of the prisoners made some hooch in the toilets so I could celebrate.

  At that time I was getting loads of messages from the twins – notes and little parcels, cigarettes, Scotch, lots of things. Then I started getting more direct messages from Ronnie. I was approached in prison by a geezer, a guy who knew the twins apparently. He warned me the Old Bill were snooping about and that if they came to me I was not to say a word about the twins, reminding me that my wife and kids were on the outside and that I’d be doing myself a favour to keep schtum.

  I had at least five heavy messages sent in from Ronnie warning me not to say anything. He particularly didn’t want me talking about any of the personal stuff. I knew what he meant. ‘Make sure you don’t say one word.’ And I didn’t. Not then anyway. But that was not the end of it.

  We’d pick up rumours on the prison grapevine about what was going on outside – that Reggie’s wife Frances Kray had attempted to gas herself in the kitchen oven at her parents’ house a week or so after our arrest. Her father found her just in time.

  We also heard that when Reggie and Ronnie had been thrown out of Morocco they’d come back to London but the Yard had left them alone. Then Ronnie had gone to ground again in north London. Apparently he had been involved in something to do with a corrupt copper.

  There’d been an inquest on George Cornell in November, resulting in a verdict of ‘murder by person or persons unknown’. So that was that. The Old Bill had given up.

  Around that time, a couple of months into our sentence, Bobby started acting very oddly. Every evening around six, the prisoners were allowed a period of association where they could go into one another’s cells, watch television or play pool or cards in the community room. So each night I’d go to Bobby’s cell only to have him kick the door closed and tell me he wasn’t in the mood to chat.

  Instead he would sit practising his guitar, often without saying a word. When I asked him, ‘What’s the matter, aren’t you coming out?’ he’d just make so
me excuse, or say he ‘didn’t feel like it’. I’d go down to the association room and the others would ask me about Bobby, unable to believe that he was my brother. ‘Have you had a row?’ ‘Don’t you speak?’ ‘Aren’t you close?’

  I was as mystified as any of them, answering, ‘Yes, we are close.’ I just really couldn’t understand what was the matter with him. Other times he was missing altogether. When I asked a warder where he was I was told he’d hurt his back, and was being taken to the general hospital for treatment. These visits to the hospital soon became a regular pattern, to the extent that I began to worry that there could be something seriously wrong with Bobby. The only times we saw one another were in the carpentry workshop, and even then he hardly talked to me. I repeatedly asked him what the problem was. But he still wouldn’t tell me anything.

  And David was right. I wouldn’t. I was eaten up with anger. The coppers had given up on who killed Cornell and turned us brothers over. And still I couldn’t say why we were all in nick. But suddenly there was something new going round the landings about the Krays. It’s to do with Frank ‘Mad Axe-Man’ Mitchell. As I heard it, that December (1966), Mad Teddy Smith and Billy Exley had got him off an outdoor work party on Dartmoor and driven him back to London. That was the dummy run Alfie had been on in the spring. Letters in Mitchell’s name started appearing in the Daily Mirror saying the Home Secretary must give him a release date. Mad Teddy wrote those. Then the letters stopped.

  All we knew was that Frank was sprung out while David, Alfie and I were in prison. And we’re all thinking at the time when we first heard about it – that’s nice, at least Frankie Mitchell will be out for Christmas – the first time for years. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. David remembers how he heard more of what was going on in the outside world:

  There seemed to be a new rumour about the twins every day. The big shocker was Frances’s suicide. I heard about it from the guy who gave me warnings in Maidstone. He said she’d done herself in, but all the chaps were saying Reggie did it. We all knew he’d wanted to get back with her, and when she wouldn’t, it made him really angry. He couldn’t be seen to lose face in front of the Firm.

  We had heard that Frosty was on the missing list. Then Mad Teddy had disappeared. They did Mad Teddy down the caravan, or so I heard. First thing we knew of it, he was missing. We were having a chat in my cell about it. Someone said: ‘I reckon one of those twins has killed him,’ and we all knew it was true. No one ever found him, although the word went round he’s buried in the marshes at Steeple Bay, right where Ronnie used to talk about getting rid of a body.

  But the really big story doing the rounds inside was about Jack the Hat. There was a contract on the money-man, Leslie Payne, who the twins had fallen out with big-time, which Jack and Billy Exley were supposed to carry out. I heard that Jack had gone round with a gun then bottled out on Payne’s doorstep when his missus had answered the door. But Jack kept the money. So they killed him.

  Word went round the landing, round the whole nick, like wildfire. I was shocked, and saddened too. Jack didn’t deserve that. He wasn’t a gangster, he was just a thief. A thief who liked a drink, that was all. Ronnie and Reggie took a liberty to do him, especially the way they did it.

  The story went like this. The twins gave Jack the ready-eye and they went all back to Blonde Carole Skinner’s for a drink. Reggie’s going to shoot him when he comes in the door but the gun jams. Ronnie grabs him and starts screaming and Jack gets it from Reggie with a breadknife in the stomach. When I heard about, it to be honest, I thought, ‘Thank God I’m in here.’

  Jack’s body vanished. There were plenty of rumours. It was in the concrete foundations of a supermarket, it was in a motorway flyover, it had been fed to animals, burned in a hospital incinerator. One story had it dumped over a railway line near Cedra Court.

  Time passes. But now there’s another big rumour – that there’s a new copper after the Krays. I’m hearing it’s Leonard Read, ‘Nipper’, the little terrier who got burned in the Hideaway club affair – when I was taking messages from Ronnie out of Brixton to put the frighteners on Hew McCowan.

  This time he’s got a team working outside the Yard. If it’s true then the twins have got a problem. In autumn 1967 there were rumours about a cozzer called Mooney going round the East End talking to people about the Blind Beggar. They won’t leave it alone.

  Then we start hearing that the twins had been nicked. By now it’s May 1968. Could it be true? I got another warning from the Krays messenger, saying that if the police did come sniffing around asking questions I was to stay schtum – to not say a thing and ask for my lawyer. That was a message from the twins.

  I told him directly: ‘Fuck them and their message. You’ve told me this about five times. I don’t need you to tell me what to do.’

  My cellmate, a face called Terry Millman, even offered to put the guy down the laundry chute if he didn’t stop hassling me. But now it was really happening. The rumour was true. Reggie and Ronnie really were on remand. Read was putting together the charges for a full trial. Well, he’d better not come round me, I thought. I was not going to grass. Nor would anyone in my family.

  I’d already been trying to get to an open prison in order to get myself easier living conditions. It was very strict in Maidstone at the time. But each time I put an application in, the answer came back: ‘Never.’ I couldn’t know it at the time, but the Krays and everything to do with them was more sensitive than ever at the Yard. They weren’t going to risk losing sight of me.

  I tried again for a transfer, expecting another knock-back. Then I was called in by the governor and told I was going to Ford Open Prison in West Sussex.

  When I got to Ford I was disappointed to find there were about twenty of us in each dormitory. I’d have preferred to be back in Maidstone, back in my old cell. They allocated me a job, to break the tarmac of an old airfield opposite the prison with pickaxe handles. It was good exercise but I’d have terrible blisters by the end of each day.

  Every lunchtime we would have a parade so the screws could count the number of prisoners and make sure no one had run away. First you heard your name shouted out and written on a board up in front of you. You then had to get into working party lines as instructed. They would then tell us which among us had visits, or appointments of any kind. All of a sudden one day I heard my name: ‘Teale, hospital, over there.’

  I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. I had nothing wrong with me and hadn’t complained of anything. I asked, ‘Me? What for?’ and the two screws who were with me told me it was a check-up. ‘What’s happening? What have I done?’

  They told me I had to go over to the hospital. When I asked why they wouldn’t tell me, but just told me a car would be coming to pick me up. Shortly afterwards, a car pulled up at the gates driven by a screw. Once we were in the car together I asked him again: ‘Where are we going?’ But he just replied: ‘I don’t know.’

  After about half an hour’s drive we pulled up at the back of a police station in Littlehampton, taking the lift up quite a few floors until we reached a large room with a huge window, like a great wall of glass, where you could see the whole of the south coast spread out below.

  Suddenly two plain-clothes policemen came in, full of apologies and strangely polite. ‘Sorry we’re late, Dave, only we got caught up in traffic on the way from London. Do you want a cup of tea and something to eat? Some fags?’ One threw a packet of twenty fags down on the table. ‘Do you want anything else?’ They were acting like we were mates.

  They were two detective sergeants – Nipper Read’s men, as I later found out. Then it started:

  ‘You know that the twins have been arrested?’ one said.

  ‘I had heard that,’ I said.

  At that, the screw left the room and one of the detectives told me: ‘So you know the twins have been nicked and they are going to go away for a long time. What do you know about them?’

  I didn’t kn
ow what to say. I’d had that warning. ‘Not a lot,’ I answered.

  The officer replied with heavy sarcasm: ‘Oh, you don’t, do you? And you don’t know anything about the Cornell murder either, I suppose?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I answered.

  ‘Well, there are lots of rumours flying round, I suppose you’ve heard… When we asked Ronnie Kray about it, he said that all he knew was that “the Teales were involved”. That’s what Ronnie told my governor.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking!’ I said. I couldn’t believe that even Ronnie would try a stunt like that. But I still stuck to the line that I didn’t know the Krays and that I had nothing to say.

  He then started asking me to write a statement. He was very insistent.

  ‘I can’t do that. I’ve told you I’ve got nothing to say. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Leave me alone.’

  Finally they agreed to take me back to the prison. Returning to my dormitory I didn’t sleep a wink, worrying about what this was all about, and what was going to happen. Next day at about ten in the morning came the message that I had to be sent to the ‘hospital’ again. At least this time I knew what to expect. On arrival I was given a fag and a cup of tea.