Bringing Down the Krays

by Bobby Teale

  What I did in giving evidence against the Krays had to be done. I’m not a grass, although I did feel like one at the time. I always think it was Ronnie himself who put me there. It was very frightening standing there in court looking at them. They thought they could walk on water. But you can’t let someone go round killing and torturing people without trying to do something to stop them.

  We knew we had no choice, and I wasn’t prepared to live the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. You can’t live your life being frightened all the time, and it wasn’t in my nature to skulk around the place being scared.

  The big problem for Alfie and me was that we couldn’t get work. We couldn’t go and get a job in Marks and Spencer, so we went back to doing what we’d always done, street trading, often with police at our side, trying to look the other way. When the police came with us, they used to have their daily wages out of it as well. Give them a fiver or ten quid, and they’d take it all right.

  Alfie felt exactly the same. He says:

  It wasn’t like when a witness gets given a new identity and plenty of money. You just had to take your chances. So after a while I had to tell the police that David and I were going to go back out street trading.

  I’d been doing that since I was nine years old, starting with rain hats for sixpence and working my way up, looking out for my uncle George who was selling brooches for two shillings and sixpence, half a crown. David used to look over to me and shout, ‘Alfie, up for your life,’ which meant the coppers were coming, or ‘Alfie, slow up,’ which meant I could serve the customers but that there was a policeman further up the street. If he said, ‘Up for your life,’ I’d pack everything up quickly and run into Oxford Street Marks and Spencers.

  Once we were up in court in front of a judge who pointed out: ‘These people pay their rent for working – look what they’ve paid over their last offences – two and six, five shillings, ten shillings, and two and six again.’ Once I even asked a police officer to lend me half a crown to pay my fine, which he did. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘don’t forget to pay me back tomorrow.’

  Our days of excitement – and terror – in running with the Krays were over. There were new temptations – like selling our story to a newspaper. I’d gone well to ground by now but the papers knew where to find my brothers. David got an offer.

  Dick De Lillo, the policeman David had talked to, the one who knew about his statement saying Ronnie had raped him, told him a man named George Martin from the Daily Mirror wanted to talk to him. This was just a few weeks after the end of the trial.

  So David went up to the Mirror’s offices in Holborn and met him. Martin talked to him and then asked him to come in again to meet their chief crime reporter, Norman Lucas, who had broken the Boothby story in 1964 – thus fatally compromising the police investigation. He told David he could make a lot of money if he chose to sell his story, giving the intimate details of our lives with the Krays. But in the end David decided not to, or at least for the time being.

  That might have been just as well. Something big was going down.

  Have you wondered why, having given evidence against the Krays, David and Alfie didn’t have to do like I did, and get out of the country afterwards? Even the villains round here and up in the West End didn’t frighten them. They would drink in villains’ pubs and clubs round Charing Cross and Gray’s Inn Road and never feared any reprisals. Occasionally, in the months and years after the trial when Alfie or David were recognised they might be asked: ‘Would you mind drinking up and getting out?’ Some people even thought they must either be mad, or worse than the Krays themselves. But generally they didn’t get bothered.

  The reason why they didn’t have to run out was because they did a deal with the Krays.

  The only people who knew about this were David and Alfie. I had no idea till years afterwards.

  There had been a deal. It was like a miracle. It could have made all the difference to how my life would have turned out, but I didn’t know. David tells how it happened:

  One day, about two months after the trial, Alfie and I were having a drink, along with Dick De Lillo and another policeman, outside a pub called The Queen’s Larder in Queen’s Square, Holborn, when a geezer pulled up in a car. I thought he was asking for directions and walked over.

  I recognised Patsy O’Mara in the passenger seat. He was a bookmaker and very good friend of Freddie Foreman and the South London Firm. He was a money-getter, a lovely man who was liked by everyone. The man driving I didn’t know. Patsy wound down the window and called me over and, while Alfie stayed drinking outside the pub with the two coppers, Patsy said to me: ‘I’ve got a message for you from the Colonel.’

  My heart was in my mouth. ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  Patsy answered: ‘If you don’t say anything, about Ronnie, or his family, about anything personal, anything private and you know what he means, nothing to the press or in print, he will let sleeping dogs lie, and leave you and yours alone too.’

  It was true we knew a lot about the Krays on a personal level, the sort of stuff the papers would have loved. As Ronnie’s driver I’d been everywhere with him, often on ‘meets’ that no one else ever knew about. But I knew what this was about.

  When I was raped by Ronnie in Vallance Road I promised him that one day I’d tell everyone what he’d done. Back then I’d been hysterical. I was an acute danger to myself. But I’d said nothing. I didn’t tell Alfie. I didn’t tell Christine. As time went on I suppose I’d become even more of a liability. So all I could think of right then was to tell Patsy O’Mara, ‘I’ve got to talk to Alfie,’ who was by this time already walking over to join us.

  Still I didn’t tell Alfie what had happened in Vallance Road. Nor what Charlie Kray had done to Christine. How could I in that moment? Alfie and I told one another most things but that was just too humiliating for me as a man. Not only that I’d been raped, but that I hadn’t been able to look after my own wife. I felt too embarrassed and too ashamed even to confide in my own brother.

  But Alfie knew there were loads of things that Ronnie wanted kept quiet. As far as Alfie was concerned, the deal was about not giving away any of the other personal stuff we knew, like the rent boys Ronnie ordered him to get – or using my family, my children, to protect himself when he’d just done Cornell. That was hardly the act of an East End hard man.

  ‘Tell my brother what you’ve just told me,’ I said to Patsy.

  And so he did. After he’d told Alfie, we looked at one another in desperation. Both frightened, we started to walk away from the car to discuss his offer. But as we did so, Patsy called us back, saying:

  ‘No, Ronnie wants to know now. It’s a one-time offer only.’

  We stood a short distance away from the car, turning our backs as we talked. Alfie came up with the solution. Walking back to the car, Alfie told him: ‘We’ll do a deal on one condition only. We are going to lodge a letter with a solicitor setting down everything we know, including this meeting. And if any one of my brothers, or any member of our family, is harmed, that letter will go straight to the police, and to the press.’ (We did write this all out afterwards, although we never actually lodged it with a solicitor in the end, thinking that Ronnie and the Firm would never know whether we had or not.)

  Patsy then put his hand out of the window and said: ‘This is the hand of Ronnie Kray… If you say nothing to the papers, you’ll be safe.’

  I hesitated for a moment. Alfie and I went to walk away to discuss the offer further, but Patsy said again: ‘No, this is a one-time offer… The Colonel says he must have an answer straight away.’

  ‘It’s a deal.’

  We then went back to the two policemen without saying anything about what had happened.

  We wanted to tell Bobby about the meeting. But as he’d been missing for eight weeks by this time and we had no idea where he was, there was nothing we could do.

  So why was Ronnie being so beneficent all of a sudden? It must have bee
n the police who tipped off the Mirror to my story – apart from Ronnie and me, they were the only ones who knew. And in the way of these things, that must have reached Ronnie.

  It had not come out in court. Before I gave evidence I’d been told not to say a word about Ronnie’s sexuality. I was longing to talk about the rape but it just didn’t seem right. Anyway I felt ashamed about being raped by Ronnie.

  Christine and I were still young with three daughters and we wanted to have another go at our lives, to start again without the shadow of all that had happened before. In any case, I was frightened of talking to anyone about it, let alone seeing it in the newspapers. I knew when the police told me that Norman Lucas at the Mirror wanted to talk to me, that the Old Bill hoped to make some money out of it too. It could get very messy.

  And then a few weeks later we got the message from the Colonel, and making a deal to stay quiet seemed like the right thing to do. Knowing the Colonel, it could have been a trap, to make us think everything was OK at first, and then to do us when we were least expecting it. But as time went on, we started to realise we really were safe after all. And we’re still here to tell the tale.

  I want to say this. When Ronnie raped me he did more than damage just me, he divided me from my wife. I wanted to tell her, and needed to tell her in many ways. But it was so horrible, and so humiliating, especially for a young man to have to admit to the woman he loved – and still loves. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. As time went on it got less and less likely I’d ever get the courage to say anything.

  In the meantime Christine must have sensed I was holding something back. It became very difficult between us. In the end Christine never found out.

  I still feel so embarrassed and very angry and yet I couldn’t say anything to her. How I’ve acted for so long as if everything was all right, I don’t know. I’ve been such a good actor all my life… telling people I didn’t have my glasses when I was asked to read or write anything.

  I didn’t know about Charlie Kray raping my wife when I was in prison. I only found out what that jackal, that snake, Charlie had done when I came out in 1968. Charlie used to prey on the wives of men in prison, going round and giving them money, pretending to be concerned and then assaulting them. When Christine said she’d go to the police, he turned round and told her: ‘What did you expect to happen? I’d given you money, hadn’t I?’

  She said she would have stabbed him there and then if she’d had a knife.

  Christine was never right after that, starting to drink more and more. Eventually she became dependent on Valium. I tried to help her and stopped drinking myself for a while. We went to live in Holland and started up an antiques business, but even though she was off the drink she remained very depressed. One day I went out on the booze by myself. Christine called our daughter up in London and said to her: ‘Look after your father.’ Then she took her own life.

  CHAPTER 24

  SLIPPING AWAY

  ALFIE AND DAVID had made their deal with the Colonel. But I didn’t know. As far as my brothers were concerned I had dropped out of sight just as I had often done before. But I had told the world that I was the informer. Where was I going to run to?

  I had police bodyguards day and night. I was beginning to think I had more to fear from Scotland Yard than I did from Ronnie. When it had been suggested to me three years before that I could shoot Ronnie (when he was with my kid brother Paul in Moresby Road), I realised that when pushed into a corner they could be as calculating as the Krays.

  I remember when it came to trial how both the Krays made eye contact with me – accusing me of being ‘full of lies’. I could feel their hatred blazing at me across the courtroom.

  After the big trial, the bodyguards used to take me shopping occasionally to buy a suit or a shirt. On one occasion I gave them the slip and went to Paris for a few days by myself. But when they told me they wanted me to go to Northern Ireland and do some undercover stuff then I got really scared. I could be found dead at any time and the long hand of the Krays would be blamed. The Yard would say that I told them I didn’t want them to guard me any more and no one could say anything different and that would be that. That’s how I felt at the time. Another cop I sort of trusted warned me not to go. I turned the offer down.

  Within forty-eight hours, my bodyguards (two men armed with guns) were taken away. There was no witness protection scheme, no ready-made new life in Australia or anything like that. I had no leverage. I’d already done what they wanted. My usefulness was over.

  Suddenly I knew what to do. Call it instinct, sixth sense, whatever – I just knew. When I had first made that call from the phone booth to Scotland Yard it had felt the same way, as if I was under some kind of guiding force that was telling me that no matter what happens in the end, you have to do this right now. And now I knew it was time to run.

  I’d been told by my guards, for my own good and the good of my family, that I would have to disappear for at least five years. How do you do that? How do you explain to the people you’re leaving behind? I thought it much better just to slip away, not tell Alfie and David what had really happened. But I had to see our mother.

  As I was getting my tent and sleeping bag I went to my lovely mum and she put her arms out to give me a hug. I told her I wasn’t leaving just yet, and asked my brother Paul to come with me, although of course I knew that was impossible. Paul was ready to come. He was eating at the table in Mum’s kitchen and he said to me, ‘I won’t be long,’ and I said, ‘OK,’ but then I just slipped out of the door. That was the last time I saw our mother.

  I got to Victoria Station with the crowds of commuters going to their offices. What did they know about anything? And then I just walked around and around, thinking, I can’t do this. I heard a voice in my head saying, go! Go! You’ve got to get out of here. Leave now while you’ve still got a chance! I went to the ticket window and asked for a ticket for the Dover-Calais boat-train and was told it would be leaving in about forty-five minutes.

  I lugged my stuff on to the train and sat and waited. I was starting to cry and I could see my mum in my mind’s eye with her arms out and I started to cry even more. Several times I nearly rushed for the door to get off the train, but I just sat there, kind of paralysed. Two elderly ladies looked at me sympathetically but could not look me in the eye. They looked as sad as I was feeling, as if they wanted to say, ‘There, there, it’s all right, whatever it is.’

  They hadn’t a clue. And nor did I. I knew what I was running from but not where I was going.

  The train started to move out of the station. As I looked out of the window, London passing away behind me, I just kept crying even more. The pain was like a bullet in the heart. I have lived with it for forty-five years – deeply missing my loving mum and dad, my best friends and brothers, Alfie, David, George and Paul and my loving sisters Jane and Eileen. I never stopped loving all of you and never will. And I could only hope that each one of you would have as much love in your hearts for others as I have for you. But I had to leave you all without any more explanations. I had to hurt you to save you from greater hurt.

  When I got to Dover there was no one at the customs post so I walked on through. I was almost at the boat when a passport control man came running after me, totally out of breath and all apologetic. I was thinking somehow I was going to be held, but when he looked at my passport he just said, ‘Are you going to France on business or pleasure?’

  ‘A holiday,’ I replied.

  ‘OK,’ he said, and stamped my passport, adding ‘Have a good trip.’ With a sigh of relief I kept going and got on the ferry and started to feel a sense of freedom. Then it occurred to me the customs guy had not written anything down so the Yard may not know that I had left the country. I was wrong about that.

  I crossed the Channel from Dover. I was heading for Gibraltar, only because I heard John Lennon had married Yoko there and I thought it would be a good place to disappear among the hippies sleeping on the beach
. I got a job on a construction site driving a concrete mixer. It was here that I met my second wife, Eileen, a Canadian nurse, who was living with her friend in the tent next to mine. Eileen and I would eventually have three children.

  But even in Gibraltar, I couldn’t leave my past behind. One day a guy in a suit, obviously carrying a gun, turns up on the beach claiming to have won a weekend in the sun on some competition. When you’ve been around the Old Bill for as long as I have you begin to get a smell for them. But I was surrounded by so many people it was hard for him to get close to me. But one day he started asking me lots of questions about what I intended to do. While in prison I’d taught myself classical Spanish guitar. I told him I was going to go on into Africa to give guitar lessons. He persisted in questioning me. It was all very clumsy.

  So when he finally left a few days later I told him, ‘If you see anyone you think I might know, please give them my regards.’

  The copper looked straight back into my eyes, his voice dropped and he said, ‘I will, Bobby, I will.’

  EPILOGUE

  FORTY YEARS ON

  It was a day like any other. I was working with my son, Jason, in a green and beautiful place in British Columbia, western Canada.

  We’d come up to work on renovating a house on this lovely island of pine woods and sandy beaches, a half-hour boat-ride from Vancouver. I had been in the construction business for years. Along the way I’d made money and lost money, raised three kids, lost one wife and found another. Jason was making his own business for the future. Right now I could not help thinking about the past. It had been this way for a while.