Bringing Down the Krays

by Bobby Teale

  I ended my statement by explaining that now me and my brothers wanted ‘to break away from the Krays – but gradually’. Well, that was true. We wouldn’t have minded breaking away pretty quick, to be honest.

  CHAPTER 18

  MY STORY

  AS FOR ME, I was still in Maidstone Prison after David was transferred to Ford. I think they wanted to keep me tucked up extra secure. All those months when we’d been in the same nick I’d shunned his company, really hurt him, and I couldn’t tell him why. By now it was summer 1968. I remember still feeling completely eaten up with anger.

  I had made contact with Butler, put my life on the line for months, been through that nightmare as ‘Phillips’ – and then I’d been thrown to the wolves. I suppose I had brought it all on myself. In Maidstone Prison I had just withdrawn inside – I wouldn’t talk to David even. I just concentrated on doing my bird, wrapped up in my own anger, but I still heard whispers from outside.

  I had heard about Jack the Hat from another inmate. Christine Keeler had visited him in Maidstone and had brought him a message from the twins. That’s how we all heard. I wasn’t so shocked about Jack being dead. In fact I’d warned him they’d do this and he wouldn’t listen. But I was sorry. He’d sort of helped me get Bobby Cannon out of it that time when Reggie was going to do him. And now Reggie had done him instead. I would have saved Jack too if I could. But I was inside. What a disgusting way they killed him. It could have been me.

  I heard about Frankie Mitchell the same way, through the same guy coming into my cell for a chat. The way I heard it, Big Frank had become a liability. Albert Donoghue told David a little later that when he had visited Frank in hiding somewhere – I think it was Barking in east London – Frank had said to him: ‘Go back to the twins and tell them if Ronnie doesn’t come to see me straight away, I’m getting out of here, that’s it.’

  I heard that when Albert took the message to Ronnie, Ronnie said: ‘We’ve got to get rid of him. We can’t handle him any more. He’s too much for us.’

  Frank was as strong as a bullock and the twins knew the only way to get rid of him was to shoot him. So they arranged it with whoever it was who did it. Some say it was Freddie Foreman, but that’s all hearsay. Poor Frank didn’t even have a Christmas out. They did him on Christmas Eve.

  About halfway through my sentence, ‘Mr. Warnings’ changed his attitude towards me. It wouldn’t have been perceptible to an outsider, but I felt it in my guts, a feeling that he was suddenly dangerous. I noticed he started offering to make me cups of tea, or soup, and became suspicious he might be trying to poison me.

  Sometimes he’d come into my cell looking for a pencil sharpener. A lot of the cons used to give a pencil as fine a point as they could and then write a message in the space on an envelope where the stamp would go, carefully licking the stamp around the edges only so it wouldn’t pull the writing off when it was removed. I saw him do this, sending messages out to the twins several times. That’s how it was done. That’s how things on the outside – and on the inside – got known about pretty quick. That’s how I’d heard about the Krays being arrested.

  Then I was told by a screw that I was being taken to the hospital wing to have some X-rays done on my back. I had previously slipped over during a carpentry workshop and did indeed have a problem – but nothing urgent right then.

  I came out of my cell and changed into my clothes. I was told I was being taken for a drive, and led outside the prison to a car. I’d had enough of this sort of pantomime with Butler and Pogue. I tried a few one-liners but the coppers never said a word. So I just shut up.

  I was taken to Maidstone Police Station. There’s a little guy in a suit behind a desk. This was my first encounter with Nipper Read. I’d heard of him. He was a small man but with a lot of natural authority. He treated me very kindly. But I was suspicious.

  How much was I supposed to tell him? There were plenty of things I needed to know first. Where’s Butler? Who’s the Yard informer? What the f*** happened to Pogue? What about the deal with ‘Dan’ and getting lifted off the streets for nine months? Can I trust this guy Read? What does he know about my previous dealings with the Yard?

  I convinced myself that Read did know about me. Butler must have told him everything; shown him the surveillance photos featuring us all of us coming and going from David’s flat. But in his memoirs, The Man Who Nicked the Krays, Read says that on 18 September 1967, a month before the McVitie murder, he had been summoned to a meeting at the Yard with the new assistant commissioner, Peter Brodie, who told him: ‘Mr Read, you’re going to get the Krays.’ He was to report to Commander John Du Rose, head of the Murder Squad.

  ‘My only concern was about the enemy within,’ Read wrote. ‘I received my first shock when I discovered the criminal intelligence files contained not one single item added to the wealth of stuff I had put in during my own Commercial Street days.’ That was when he had been working the East End in the early sixties. But after that, in the aftermath of the Cornell murder – during the time when the local police and then Tommy Butler were on the case – there was nothing on file. That’s what Read said anyway.

  So what had Butler been doing? Was he asleep? Was he doing nothing for some reason we can only guess at? In his book, Read excuses Tommy Butler in a line I still find funny: ‘The fact I was starting with an absolutely clean slate was probably just as well,’ he wrote.

  I found that difficult to believe. How could Nipper not know about me? But then, I’d spent a lifetime convinced that he must have. So, maybe Butler really did keep a lid on on everything I’d told him?

  Read told me in that interview room at Maidstone Police Station he was very sorry about everything that had happened, but there had been a changeover, a new broom. Though he’s not going to say it outright, the Krays were always poison at the Yard. Only a very brave or a very foolish copper would go after them.

  The commissioner, Joe Simpson, had not wanted to know – then he’d died in office on 8 March 1968. As far as I have come to understand, Tommy Butler of Great Train Robbery fame wasn’t going to get into some tangle with the untouchable twins and their mysterious protectors. So after my brothers and I were taken off the streets in August 1966, he simply gave up.

  But this time the twins were under arrest, as I knew. So were those members of the Firm that mattered. Scotch Ian Barrie, the man with the scald marks, was in custody. So were Albert Donoghue, Cornelius Whitehead, Scotch Jack Dickson, Big Pat Connolly, and some more who’d been involved in the killing of Jack the Hat.

  Read was confident that he and his team could build a case that would put them all away for a very long time. Would I help him? It seemed to me that Read was willing to do almost whatever it took to take down the Krays. I made my own assumptions about how much he knew about me and I wondered if he was holding back on information because he didn’t trust me. But one thing was certain: it was a big ask.

  The Krays were in the security block at Brixton but the members of the Firm remaining on the outside could still get me and my whole family at any time, even if I was still in prison. At one point before he was arrested, Reggie himself had tried to see me in Maidstone, but it wasn’t allowed. He did send me a book, though, called My Kingdom for a Song. I suppose he was being ironic.

  Where was the guarantee that it would work this time? There could be no guarantee – not yet. But I would make a statement. I would discover later that this was a little after Alfie and David had first been interviewed and had given theirs on the 1st and 2nd of July. So I started to say what I knew.

  I told Read’s men how, although I’d heard stories about them from my brothers, I’d not actually met the Krays until spring 1965 when I was working on the Isle of Wight – when David rang up to say that Reggie and some friends wanted to visit someone on the island. I told them how I’d taken them to Parkhurst then brought them home for a meal. How when my wife saw who it was, she had ‘done her nut’. Those were my actual words (and she had –
done her nut I mean).

  I told them how our relationship had gone downhill after that, and how I’d returned to Holborn. I told them how gradually I’d met people I had known earlier in London and had done some street trading with in the West End. I told them how I’d got sucked into the Krays’ circle once I was back in London, going to parties and pubs with them in the East End.

  Then I told them about the night of the summons by phone to come to Madge’s. I’ve got a copy of my statement from the archive. This is exactly what I told them back then:

  Reggie came over to us and said something like: ‘Get moving quick, we’re going over to Walthamstow.’ Everything seemed urgent. He jumped into the front passenger seat beside David who was driving. There were a lot of other people leaving the pub but I cannot say who the others were as the degree of urgency cut out any observation.

  My impression was that a lot of them were from the Firm. We drove straight from Madge’s to the pub at Walthamstow. In fact, I think we drank at one or two pubs in Walthamstow before going to this particular pub… While we were drinking Ronnie was concerned about cleaning himself up and was washing his hands in the sink beneath the bar. He washed his hands in Vim and was very worried about things. I think he changed and someone brought him a change of clothes there. As far as I remember there were present Ronnie, Reggie, my brothers and me, Scots Ian, Scots Jack, Big Pat. About twenty people in all. Sammy Lederman [the one-time theatrical agent who’d become a Kray errand boy] was there and served drinks from the bar…

  I recall Sammy saying to Ronnie, ‘Ronnie, you’re a cold-blooded murderer.’ Ronnie then went out with Reggie from the bar.

  When they came back Reggie told a group of us that Ronnie had just been sick and said that Ronnie had seen the bullets going into the head and had explained to Reggie how all the blood had made him sick. They then went upstairs, in fact, all of us went to a room above the pub with our drinks. The radio was switched on and Ronnie made out that he wanted to hear the football results. Anyway there was a news flash about the shooting in the East End and that the person had since died. And then it appeared that there was a carnival. Ronnie almost jumped for joy.

  Then I told them about how they’d holed up in David’s flat – but not about Ronnie’s move on my young brother Paul or what I had done as a result, not yet. I wanted to know more about what these guys already knew about the Butler-Pogue set-up before I gave them my side.

  I told them about the guns in the flat and how to begin with I thought that these had been brought in to counter the threat of reprisals from Cornell’s friends, the Richardsons, rather than because the Krays were getting ready for a shoot-out with the police. What happened afterwards was harder to explain. This was my statement:

  We stayed there for about two weeks when Reggie moved to a flat in Green Lanes, Manor House, in a new block of flats. It was the flat he had lived in [briefly] with his wife … I moved in with him. [It was No 6 Manor Lea, 295 Green Lanes N4.] I stayed with him there for about a couple of weeks then we moved to Cambridge. It was supposed to be a holiday. We went first to Saffron Walden where the Krays had a friend [this was the conman and arsonist, Geoffrey Allen].

  There were two cars. There was me, Frosty (an East Ender) and Reggie in one, and in the other car was Ronnie, Ian and I think Connie Whitehead and Scotch Jack. This friend of the Krays is a very rich man and owns a Mercedes and has an estate agent business. We went to his house outside the village. It was large with tennis courts and everything. I can’t describe where it is but could point it out if necessary. We stayed the day then came back to London.

  We went to this village again on another occasion when we stayed in a hotel. Then after we had been there a couple of days we left because of trouble by us in the hotel. At the hotel there would have been about six of us – the twins, Ian, Scots Jack, myself and I think Connie. We then went on to Cambridge where we stayed in the Grand Hotel, I think it was called [it was the Garden House Hotel]. They all gave different names. I stuck to my own name.

  We returned from Green Lanes and after a while they got a flat in Lea Bridge Road. During this time Ronnie went to live in a little bungalow with Ian [Barrie]. The man [Charlie Clark] and his wife who owned the place were there as well. The woman kept a lot of cats. It was in London but I can’t remember where. It could be Walthamstow near a dog track, past the stadium on the right-hand side, two turnings down on the right-hand side. The guy is a bookmaker.

  He was terrified of Ronnie. I used to go there with Reggie. I think the road was called Loxham [Loxham Road in Walthamstow E4]. Later Ronnie and Ian left this flat and Reggie and myself left the Green Lanes flat and went to the flat in Lea Bridge Road. It was over a barber’s shop.

  After a while I left them and moved away from the area. I know they were looking for me from enquiries I now know they made for me, by them I mean the Krays. I have not seen the twins or Ian [Barrie] since I left the flat.

  That is what I told Nipper Read’s men in early July 1968.

  There were some things I didn’t mention, such as the drive with Reggie to Epping Forest when he’d started shooting at me. I did tell them that they’d come looking for me at Steeple Bay, though I didn’t mention where. But I certainly didn’t mention how I’d taken refuge with that ‘Wallace’ character in Dolphin Square – though I think Nipper Read knew a lot of it already. He wanted to work on us one by one. The police could not know for sure that I hadn’t somehow been able to get a message to David or Alfie – but in fact I had not.

  In each of our three cases, Alfie, David and I, the police used a different form of leverage – but all the methods were equally subtle and cynical. Whatever they claimed, they were working on us to give evidence in open court.

  Then they played really sneaky.

  In between my little visits to Maidstone Police Station and Tintagel House they brought my mother up to have tea in the governor’s office at Maidstone Prison. They told her how brave I was being, and what a hero I was. Mum looked very pleased to see me. It was all about softening me up to give evidence.

  They also told me on several occasions that what I had done, what I had already given them, was so powerful they would never, ever ask me to give evidence in open court. There would be others who could do that.

  That part was not true. Read was determined to do whatever it took to get the Krays. He would let criminals off, even let murderers off, as long it brought them down.

  Nipper Read wanted me not only to give evidence but also to reveal in court that I was an informer. Only then might others follow. Only then would he have his case. He was asking me to gamble with my life.

  When the time came I would have to face them from the witness box. And I would do so.

  CHAPTER 19

  BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE OF CARDS

  ALL OF THREE of us had given statements. We would soon be on our way to London under heavy guard to give them again in open court at the committal proceedings, when the prosecution must produce enough evidence for a case to be made to proceed to a full trial. Of us brothers, David was up first. This is how he describes what happened:

  They took me from Ford Prison to Bow Street for the committal. It was 16 July 1968. We were in a squad car driven fast in a convoy surrounded by yet more armed police. It was Covent Garden, an area I knew well from when Alfie, Bobby and I used to play there as kids, nicking flowers from the market for the altar in our church (St Joseph’s). At that time, early in the morning, the market was very crowded, and I knew a lot of the porters who worked round there. The police told me to ‘put this blanket over your head’. It was exciting, but also terrifying and strange. We just didn’t know what to expect.

  I was in the back of the car just near the Opera House when I peeped out from behind a corner of the blanket, and saw a face I recognised in the crowd – a family friend called Johnny Cracknell, a market porter known as a ‘cart minder’. Johnny was directing the traffic around Bow Street as there was quite a back-up by the
n. I thought to myself, ‘If only you knew it’s me in the police car!’ We then went through the big gates, into the back of the yard behind the court. The place was packed. It was overrun with police, a lot of uniform but even more in plainclothes.

  I was whisked into another crowded room where we waited for about half an hour and they gave me a cup of tea. I glanced round the room. I recognised the barmaid from the Blind Beggar and also Leslie Payne. And then we went in the court. Nipper Read was there and all the other officers who’d interviewed me in Tintagel House. Read said to me before I went in: ‘Just say exactly what you’ve been telling us, and confirm that you are prepared to go the higher court and say the same.’ I would be known as ‘Mr D’.

  I didn’t know much about what had been happening with the Krays since their arrest but I soon picked it up. They’d been nicked on holding charges – a lot of guff about stolen bearer bonds, the Mafia, dynamite and assassination plots that Read had cooked up somehow.

  Then, much more to the point, Billy Exley had given evidence about the escape of Frank Mitchell. Then after Scotch Ian Barrie was nicked, the Blind Beggar barmaid said she would identify him. So that was it: Ronnie and Scotch Ian were down for the murder of George Cornell. And Reggie was charged with ‘acting to impede their apprehension’. Read’s told me to say what I know about that – and I was prepared to do so.

  The witness box itself was surrounded by armed police, and looked like something out of Dickens. The court was so crowded it was hard at first to make out what was going on. I tried to ‘front it up’ the way I always used to, to act tough even if I didn’t feel like it. But inside I was absolutely petrified.