Krays- the Final Word

by James Morton

  And after the unfortunate Wheater, the Twins turned to Sampson & Co, and in particular the clerks Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Fryde and Ralph Haeems for help.

  Manny Fryde’s pedigree was never quite clearly established. He probably qualified as a solicitor in South Africa and may or may not have been struck off there. Opinion is more or less equally divided. By the 1950s, however, he was working in England as a managing clerk, and an exceptionally powerful one at that.

  A great Zionist who kept a list of known Blackshirts and sympathisers under the carpet in his office, on one occasion Fryde visited the home of a client charged with murder, and when using the lavatory found a swastika painted on the ceiling. He promptly threatened to withdraw from the case, and it took a good deal of persuasion (and no doubt an additional fee) for him to accept that the offending swastika was nothing more sinister than an Aryan symbol of light which had been painted by a previous tenant and had not been cleaned away.

  In the early 1960s Fryde took Ralph Haeems, the son of Bombay schoolteachers, under his wing. He offered him a job filing and also used him to collect his winnings from local betting shops. Always a great and entertaining gossip, Haeems recalled:

  ‘He [Fryde] never carried less than £5,000 on him. One time he sent me to a small shop opposite the Law Courts and I handed in the winning ticket. The girl went for the manager, who asked who I was from. I said Fryde. He said, “Here’s the money and tell the effing bastard not to come in the shop again.” It was £12,000.’

  This was at a time when a newly qualified solicitor could expect to earn in the region of £20 a week.

  Conversation with JM, 4 July 2013.

  Nat. Arch. MEPO 2/10763; The Times, 14 May 1971.

  Nat. Arch. MEPO 2/11462.

  Chapter 8

  The Hide-A-Way

  As autumn 1964 became winter, Nipper Read was getting nowhere. The top club owners in the West End such as Edmundo Ros (sic) said they were not paying protection; Danny La Rue, lying through his teeth, said he was not paying protection; Al Burnett, who ran the Pigalle, a nightclub in Swallow Street off Piccadilly, said he was too big to pay protection. That was where Frank Fraser held a homecoming party on his release from slashing Jack Spot; Billy Hill smashed a bottle over a man’s head there after a quarrel, and in 1961 ‘Scotch’ Jack Buggy shot Robert Reeder on the pavement outside after an argument in the club.

  Nor were the LF men in east and north London turning. From time to time Read thought he had made a breakthrough but at the next meeting the man would bring along a solicitor and say nothing.

  There were also noises from the top in the form of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Ernie ‘Hooter’ Millen, so nicknamed either because of his nose or his foghorn voice or perhaps both. With Fred Gerrard away on leave he took the opportunity to summon Read to the Yard to ask him what progress was being made. The answer with regard to the Krays was very little, because no one dared to say a word against them. The authorities seriously considered winding the investigation up.

  The Krays, however, were doing nicely. Along with their other acquisitions was a club in the basement of the Glenrae Hotel in the Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park, slightly away from their normal territory.

  The owner Phoebe Woods had bought the hotel in 1959 and had renovated it. After a number of incidents the Krays moved in ‘to stop further violence’. Billy Exley and Sammy Lederman became the barmen, with the faithful Bobby Ramsey on the door and attempting to keep the books. Exley ordered all the stock and Mrs Woods paid.

  That, at least, was the police version of events. It does not wholly coincide with the version offered to me by Micky Fawcett, who said of the club after the Krays had taken it over:

  ‘Within a week or two it was the busiest club in London. Ted [Woods] was highly delighted. The bar had been empty and now everyone was looking at it.’96

  Just after New Year Read’s luck seemed to turn. Or so it seemed at the time. It involved another small West End club, The Hide-A-Way in Gerrard Street, Soho, run by the gay Scots baronet Huw Cargill McCowan.

  In its previous incarnations the premises had had a chequered career. At one time in the early 1960s it was the Bon Soir. Gilbert France, the owner of Chez Victor, a nearby fashionable French restaurant in Wardour Street and friend of club owner and Soho hardman Tony Mella, had owned it with Frank Fraser and Albert Dimes. The club did not do well, although Fraser couldn’t really understand why:

  ‘It was a classy joint… It had a little band, food, everything. That did well for a time but it’s the same with everything in Soho, all the clubs, all the restaurants; one day everyone’s going there and tomorrow you’re yesterday’s dinner.’97

  France had a different view of things, telling The People that after he had opened the club in early 1962 it had been successful until, in early 1963, there had been trouble with fights and furniture being smashed and customers frightened, in the traditional way a protection racket operates. He had then gone into partnership with what he described as ‘two well-known Soho personalities’, presumably referring to Dimes and Fraser, but then once again trouble had broken out, with windows being smashed. The partnership had been dissolved and after bomb threats, France closed the club. Fraser wrote that Dimes had lost heart and Joe Wilkins – the nephew of Bert Wilkins, the old Sabini man – took over his interest but also lost money. A fire was the only solution.

  McCowan had already met the Twins through Leslie Payne when they had unsuccessfully tried to get McCowan to invest in the Eastern Nigeria housing project.

  McCowan had foolishly mentioned that he was thinking of opening a club and it was arranged he should meet the Twins in the Grave Maurice. According to McCowan, Reggie had maintained it was essential that he have two of his men installed in the club to prevent trouble. Initially a figure of 25% was suggested, which was to rise to 50%. A table for 10 was reserved for the Twins’ party on the opening night but no one appeared. Then at 2.30 a.m. on 18 December 1964 their friend Mad Teddy Smith, the one-time manager of blind pianist Lennie Peters, and who had had a play on television, appeared at the premises drunk, breaking two small neon signs behind the reception desk. The total cost was in the region of £20. Later he returned to apologise, but soon afterwards McCowan settled with the Twins for a flat 20%. He did not, however, let the matter lie and went to John Donald, a Detective Inspector at Marylebone, who in turn contacted Read.

  Now McCowan, who had a history of making and withdrawing allegations of theft against boys he had picked up in the Music Box, a club off Piccadilly Circus, convinced Read he would stay the distance. In support was the club’s young manager, the 21-year-old Sidney Vaughan, who backed McCowan’s story. Read thought:

  ‘[McCowan is] not a particularly homosexual type in that he does not dress in a flamboyant fashion nor does he adopt exaggerated female gestures. Will make an excellent witness.’

  As for Vaughan:

  ‘Once he has surmounted the initial shock of the witness box I am sure that he will make a truthful and convincing witness.’

  An alternative version of the Hide-A-Way troubles is that on a visit to the Glenrae Hotel McCowan had approached the Twins to go into partnership but changed his mind a couple of weeks later. This was not the sort of behaviour the pair would tolerate, and explains their failure to appear on opening night. As for Teddy Smith, he had not been acting on their instructions. With the gift of hindsight perhaps Read should have made more inquiries into McCowan’s background.

  In early January 1965 the Glenrae Hotel was raided by the police investigating the disappearance of the safebreaker Tommy ‘Ginger’ Marks. There is no doubt now that he was shot by Alfie Gerard and Freddie Foreman but, as usual, there are several reasons on offer behind the killing. The generally accepted one is that a Jimmy Evans had shot Freddie Foreman’s brother George in a domestic dispute, and Marks was killed in mistake for Evans when they were out on a breaking exercise
. Evans’ version is that Marks had been badmouthing Foreman to Dukey Osborne in particular and the underworld in general, saying that he was a grass in cahoots with police officers Tommy Butler and Frank Williams. This had been relayed back to Foreman, who took appropriate action. Since the shooting was close to Vallance Road there are also tales that the Twins told Foreman where he might find Marks and Evans that night.

  Foreman denied this. He claims his brother George had been having an affair with Evans’ wife Pat, and as a result Marks and Evans had gone to George’s front door and let off a shotgun in the direction of George’s testicles. Both were therefore due at least a major reprisal, but when Foreman and Alf Gerard caught up with them Evans hid behind Marks and escaped. George Foreman survived the shooting and he and Pat Evans remained together until his death in 2017. Ten years later Gerard and Foreman were acquitted of Marks’ murder on the direction of the trial judge.98

  As for that raid on the Glenrae, nothing was found of any interest. However, on the evening of 10 January 1965 the Twins were arrested there to face charges of demanding money with menaces from McCowan.

  When Read and other detectives went to arrest them, a distraught Phoebe Woods almost literally threw herself at Read’s feet telling him how grateful she was and that he had saved her life. Under the circumstances, perhaps naively, he did not take a statement from her there and then, instead arranging that she should go to a police station the next day.

  It was a serious mistake, because overnight things changed dramatically. The next morning Phoebe appeared at Old Street Magistrates’ Court offering to stand bail and telling Read that the Krays’ management of the club was an arrangement with which she and her husband were perfectly satisfied. ‘The difference between this assured, well-turned out woman and the pathetic wretch who had been grovelling at my feet the evening before was remarkable. I just couldn’t believe the transformation’, wrote Read. He admitted later he should have arrested Charlie Kray rather than leaving him on the outside to work his magic.99

  Phoebe Woods standing surety or not, there was no way the trio was going to get bail that morning from the stipendiary magistrate Neil ‘Mick’ McElligott, most of whose career at the Bar had been as a prosecutor. He had a fearsome reputation and kept tight control over the unruly elements of the area. His reputation was such that if he was seen to be sitting that day a defendant would often go home and get a sick note from a tame doctor which his mother would present half an hour later.

  After the senior officer Fred Gerrard told McElligott that there were still two people to be arrested, the Twins were remanded in custody. Teddy Smith was one of the two still missing and the fourth man, the Twins’ friend Johnny Francis, sensibly absented himself to Torremolinos. Even after Teddy Smith’s arrest, repeated bail applications over the following weeks before McElligott, the Divisional Court and the Lord Chancellor, all failed.

  At the committal proceedings Sidney Vaughan was called for the prosecution but very soon had to be treated as a hostile witness. He had made a statement to the local vicar John Foster that he was being paid £40 a week by McCowan, who threatened to stop his money if he failed to give the evidence which he now admitted was false. Nevertheless the magistrate committed the Twins and Smith for trial. Leslie Payne would later make a statement saying that it had been Charlie Kray’s very sensible idea to involve a local vicar.

  In their application to the Divisional Court the Twins’ counsel Petre Crowder put it nicely. Bail was necessary because witnesses needed to be found, and these witnesses only surfaced in Soho between two and three in the morning. The only way of finding them was by sight. Their first names were known, but not their surnames. The defendants had competent and experienced solicitors. As for interfering with witnesses, this was far from the case. Even before McCowan had given evidence at the magistrate’s court the police knew that Sidney Vaughan had gone sour on them. As Crowder explained it:

  ‘…a curious situation has arisen. Charles Kray, a brother of the defendants, was telephoned by the employee [Vaughan]; it so happened that an inquiry agent and former police officer William Noble was, fortuitously, with Charles Kray and it seemed that the employee asked if he could, and he did, come round to see Charles Kray. The employee said that his conscience had smitten him, that he had been forced by the complainant to give evidence and that his evidence was untrue. Hardly had he said that he had been forced to give evidence than, it so happened quite by chance, the local parish priest appeared on the scene paying a courtesy visit. Solicitors had arranged for the inquiry agent and Charles Kray to make a statement on oath of what the employee had said, and it was also proposed to take a similar statement from the priest.’

  As there had been talk of interference Crowder thought that he should expose these matters to the court.100 He went on to say that the Twins had been arrested on 6 January and were unlikely to have their case heard until March, meaning ‘the two young men would be in custody for two months on a charge of which they would very likely be acquitted’. Bail was nevertheless refused.

  The next day however, on 11 February, Lord Boothby showed his worth and did what was required of him. While denying he held any brief for the Twins, he asked in the House of Lords whether ‘it is the intention of Her Majesty’s Government to imprison the Krays indefinitely without trial’. He was soundly rebuked by Myra Hindley’s champion, the normally mild and gentle Lord Longford: ‘My noble friend will regret this intervention when he reads it afterwards in cold blood’. Which is about as far as Longford ever went in a reprimand of any kind.

  Meanwhile, the Krays’ pythons Gerrard and Read had died a few days after their owners were arrested.

  The police had searched through papers found in the Kray flats but tried, sometimes without success, to match the scrawled names with people. Unsurprisingly they included: William Noble, who, the police noted, had given evidence for the defence in the case against Charlie and Ronnie at Marylebone; the Nash brothers; Danny Shay from the Podro case, whom they still wrongly thought was Frances’ brother; Mickey Bloom, who had been with Ronnie Marwood when PC Summers was killed; Billy Gentry, who they did not recognise but who later went down for a robbery with John McVicar; and several men including Micky Fawcett, Peter Wylde and Billy Exley, whom they thought were involved in collecting protection money. There was also a scattering of entertainers: Lita Rosa and Winifred Atwell, described in the notes as a ‘Negro pianist’; the artist Francis Bacon; Barbara Windsor; a couple of American gangsters; two journalists from the Sunday Times; and Gordon Goodfellow, Boothby’s ‘manservant’.

  Just before the trial the Twins’ lawyer, the extremely clever but extremely dubious Manny Fryde, asked for another £1,500 to instruct counsel and Charlie was dispatched to Lord Boothby to request more of the £40,000 he had received in damages. But when he got there the cupboard was bare with Boothby telling him, ‘I’ve spent it all.’

  In those days barristers, jurors, witnesses and defendants on bail all mixed happily with each other in the foyer or the basement tea room of the Old Bailey. Criminals are superstitious, and Paul Wrightson, who had prosecuted Reggie in the Podro case, now defended him. When the trial began on 8 March, after lunch on the second day with McCowan still giving evidence, Fryde claimed that he had been told by a man that he had overheard one of the jurors had told a PC Cuff that he knew all about protection rackets and considered it an open and shut case. The man, who had a criminal record and who had been questioned over the sale of the shares in Esmeralda’s Barn, picked out the juror and, despite the man’s denials, after legal discussion he was discharged. The trial continued with 11 jurors. Read noted that it was clear the jurors had looked too intelligent and Fryde had made the move in the hope of getting a new and less intelligent group.

  Much of the ammunition used by the defence to attempt to discredit McCowan came from Vaughan. Neither of the Twins was called to give evidence but Leslie Payne and Gordon Anderson, another
who had been involved in the ill-fated Nigerian project, testified McGowan had wanted to meet the Krays, and Anderson had arranged the meeting. Rodney Auerbach of Montague Gardiner, the Shaftesbury Avenue firm of solicitors who had sent the £5,000 to secure Payne’s release in Nigeria, gave evidence that he had been at a meeting to discuss the Twins taking an interest in the Hide-A-Way, and had advised them not to do so. Nipper Read rather sourly noted in his report that at the time Montague Gardiner was owed £300 by the Krays, a bill which was settled after Auerbach gave evidence. The Reverend John Foster duly gave his evidence that he had been at Vallance Road when, quite fortuitously, Vaughan had arrived to make his confession. In fact just after 3 p.m. on 20 January that year, Detective Sergeant Sidney Hall had watched the priest drive up with Billy Exley, Tommy Brown and Bill Ackerman, but for some reason he was never called to give evidence.

  The trial ended when the jury failed to agree, and by the time of the second trial, which began on 29 March, McCowan’s background had been thoroughly investigated by another private detective, George Devlin. McCowan again gave his evidence well, telling the jury that he had met with Vaughan in the Music Box, where he said Vaughan told him the Krays would pay any money to have him leave the country. McCowan said he decided to go along with Vaughan and asked for £20,000 down and £30,000 when he got to Tangier. ‘Sidney said, “If I don’t accept I’ll be killed”,’ McGowan told the court. He also said Vaughan was going to arrange a meeting with Lord Boothby and ask for his help.

  In cross examination, however, McCowan admitted he had alleged blackmail in three previous cases and in 1953 had been placed on probation for three years on condition he remained in Murray Royal Hospital after he had been convicted at the Edinburgh High Court on four counts of sodomy. He had broken the terms of his probation and had served four months in January 1956 and another 30 days the previous year for having unlawful relations with a male person.