Krays- the Final Word

by James Morton

  This time Sidney Vaughan was not called to give evidence by either the prosecution or defence. Now, in addition to Auerbach and the Reverend Foster, a Harry Beckett gave evidence he had met McCowan in the Grave Maurice, who told him he was sorry the Krays were no longer interested. Called to discredit McCowan, who said he had put £6,000 into the club, interior decorator Stanley Peters said he was still owed money. However, he admitted receiving part-payment and that the rest of the bill was being disputed. Stanley Crowther appeared as a witness for the Twins (despite previously telling the police they were blackmailing him over his homosexual activities), and claimed McGowan had expressed regret to him that they weren’t taking an interest in his club.101 This time, before the defence counsel made their closing speeches, the judge told the jury that if they did not believe McCowan, they should acquit. They did so after retiring for only ten minutes. Reg Kray claimed the trial had cost him his flat, a cottage and 600 acres of land near Bantry. He also tacitly admitted that the jury in the first trial had been nobbled.102

  The Twins returned to Vallance Road in triumph with family, friends and, most importantly, the press, to greet and cheer them. Their grandfather Cannonball Lee and his wife were there, and he threw a few mock punches for the benefit of photographers, who also took the picture of the three brothers in that now-famous cross-handshake. The red-haired Frances Shea wore a pair of fluffy mules to welcome Reggie. ‘I love you, darling,’ Reggie said, before suggesting they might get married the following week.103

  Ronnie said they wanted ‘a bit of peace and quiet’. There were threats to sue the police for malicious prosecution, but nothing came of them. For his part Boothby wrote a letter of congratulation, saying he never doubted the outcome:

  ‘They gave me a pretty rough time in the House of Lords. But they have been proved wrong and I have been proved right. So to some extent I share in your triumph.’

  With their acquittal the Krays effectively now had a licence to run Soho and the West End, and within days they ‘bought’ the Hide-a-Way, renaming it the El Morocco. Now in charge was a consortium of Gilbert France, the three Krays, Teddy Smith and Freddie Foreman. The Twins threw a party on the opening night and among the glitterati attending were Edmund Purdom, Adrienne Corri, Victor Spinetti, Lita Rosa and Roy Kinnear. Also on parade were Dolly, Violet and Frances Shea. Not to be outdone, Charlie, who had by now taken over the Sammy Lederman show-business agency, said he was managing a pop group from Yorkshire, ‘The Shots’, who would soon be playing there.

  Read and his right-hand man Trevor Lloyd-Hughes were watching from telephone boxes opposite the club, marking down those who went to the party. However, George Devlin spotted them and invited them in. Read was reluctant to go but was unwilling to back down, particularly as Gilbert France also said he should come in. He did so, leaving Lloyd-Hughes outside. Once in the club he was confronted by an irate Ronnie Kray, who was calmed down by Reggie. Read had a look round and left within minutes. The next day he found, to his great annoyance, that the Express reporter Percy Hoskins wrote that he had looked in, ‘…stayed half an hour and drank a good luck toast with the Twins’. Although Hoskins immediately apologised for his mistake, it is a story which despite Read’s protests has been continually repeated. The photograph said to be taken of him in the club was in fact of the actor Edmund Purdom.104

  Much to the regret of her parents, on 19 April 1965 Reggie Kray married Frances Shea at St James the Great in Bethnal Green in what was described by the bridegroom as the East End ‘marriage of the year’. He’d been courting her since she was 15 and used her brother Frank as a driver.

  Father Hetherington had apparently declined an invitation to officiate and appropriately enough John Foster, who had done so much to secure Reggie’s availability, officiated instead. Wearing a blue velvet suit, David Bailey, himself an East Ender, took a photograph of the bride and among the two hundred guests were Diana Dors and Joan Littlewood, the dancers the Clark brothers and various East End boxers such as Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis and Terry Allen. Boothby sent a congratulatory telegram. Cal McCrystal of the Sunday Times, there as a guest, recalls that when the congregation did not respond enthusiastically enough to the first hymn, Ronnie as best man, walked down the aisle waving his hands and saying, ‘Sing, fuck you, sing.’ The bride’s mother pointedly wore black, a demonstration of lèse-majesté which the Krays never forgave.

  The reception was held at the Glenrae Hotel, to which the happy couple drove in a Rolls Royce. An unhappy honeymoon was spent in Athens, with rumours that the marriage had not been consummated and allegations that Frances had been revolted by suggestions she should accept anal intercourse. The pair then came home to a flat in the Edgware Road and then moved to the ground floor flat in Cedra Court, just underneath Ronnie’s flat where he held his homosexual orgies, known as ‘Pink Ballets’.

  The marriage continued unhappily and the Twins’ cousin Ronnie Hart recalled Frances had a fear of blood, and that Reggie, when drunk, which was often, would torment her by deliberately cutting himself and flicking blood on her. He would leave her downstairs when he went up to join his twin at the parties being held there. A member of the Firm always accompanied her when she went out and when she threatened to leave him he said he would kill her father. Within a matter of weeks Frances returned to her family.

  Two years later she was dead. She had changed her name back to Shea and commenced a suit for nullity on the grounds that the marriage had never been consummated. Reggie, fearful that his status as a lover would be compromised, asked that he be allowed to bring the petition rather than Frances, but he delayed and dawdled as her mental health deteriorated. Over the months she took more and more pills, helpfully supplied by the good Dr Blasker, and twice tried to commit suicide. On 7 June 1967 she died at her brother’s house in Wimbourne Street, Hackney after taking an overdose. By now the Krays were such public figures that her death was reported on the front page of The Times.

  At the inquest Dr Julian Silverstone said Frances had been admitted twice to hospital after taking drug overdoses. The coroner Ian Milne said, ‘She had a two-year history of personality disorder. Her marriage was on the rocks, though there seems to have been recent hopes of a reconciliation’.105

  Ronnie had always loathed her, insulting her publicly and constantly trying to claim his brother back from her. Her diary and letters were sold in May 2014, and they describe how unhappy she was and how isolated she felt living at their Marble Arch flat, repeatedly being subjected to Reggie’s swearing and drunken, abusive behaviour:

  ‘(Reggie) came in late every night drunk. Got up every morning two minutes to dress, left me all day, came back late at night drunk.

  Went to his house – his brother walked in bedroom in underwear, swore at me.

  Him and his friend took me to the hospital, he was swearing and shouting at me in the car.

  Couldn’t stand it anymore – left him. When I was packing my suitcases to leave he told me he would bring up fictitious characters against me.’

  After her death her brother Frank Shea, as administrator of his sister’s estate, sued Reggie for the £١,000 Frances had lent him a month before the wedding. This was a staggering sum, in today’s terms rather over £18,000. Reggie was described in the legal paperwork as ‘well known in gambling and sporting circles’ and his address given as Luke House, Bigland Street, London. Reggie decided to kill Frank but, because he looked so much like Frances, he could not bring himself to do it personally. He offered the job to Tony Lambrianou, who sensibly declined.

  According to Ronnie Hart, Reggie went to the mortuary a number of times talking to her and telling her, ‘I’ll get even with those bastards [her parents] if it takes the whole of my life, because they killed you.’ At her funeral Albert Donoghue was ordered to make a list of those who had not sent flowers – for future reference.

  After the funeral, for which he had a five-foot-tall wreath made of re
d roses in the shape of a heart ‘broken’ by white roses through the middle, Reggie would regularly visit Chingford Mount cemetery. There he would kneel in front of the grave and cry. Before an Italian marble headstone was erected he had bought a three-foot-high plastic windmill. On one occasion he saw a robin perched on it and began talking to it, saying, according to Hart:

  ‘I knew you loved me, I knew you’d come back to me. He dug out the windows of the windmill saying, ‘There you are darling, now you can get back in. I’ll always come and see you Frankie, you know that because you know how much I love you and I know you love me and will come and see me.’106

  Once when he and Hart visited her grave on her birthday they found the Sheas visiting at the same time. Mrs Shea accused Kray of killing her daughter, saying that it would do him no good even if he spent £1,000 a week on flowers because ‘we will never forgive you and neither will she’. The following week on another visit to the grave, Reggie took the Shea flowers from their pots and destroyed them. Over the following months he tormented her parents, ordering children to scratch Mrs Shea’s Mini and sending anonymous messages to her saying her husband had met with an accident or had been killed at work.

  After their acquittal in the Hide-A-Way case the Twins occasionally showed some sense. They declined an invitation to speak at the Cambridge Union in a debate entitled ‘The Law is an Ass’, saying, ‘What’s the point of talking about the law? You only get yourself worked up and there’s nothing you can do about it.’107

  The Twins soon lost interest in the El Morocco and after a few changes of management, it was eventually run by Barbara Windsor’s husband, Ronnie Knight.

  Conversation with JM 25 January 2019

  Frank Fraser, Mad Frank’s London, p. 74.

  Leonard Read, The man who nicked the Krays, p.103; Jimmy Evans, and Martin Short, The Survivor; Freddie Foreman & Tony Lambrianou, Getting it Straight, pp. 65-6.

  Leonard Read, The Man who Nicked the Krays, pp 102-3.

  The Times, 11 February 1965.

  Nat. Arch. MEPO 2/10763. Police report. para 140.

  Reg Kray, Born Fighter, p. 93.

  Lewis Chester and Cal McCrystal, ‘The Long Hard climb from Bethnal Green’, Sunday Times, 11 April 1965.

  Daily Express, 30 April 1965.

  Daily Express, 8 June 1967; Daily Mirror, 14 June 1967.

  Unpublished MS by Hart.

  ‘The Kray Brothers: Reg, Charlie, Ron’, London Life, 27 November 1965; Ronald Hart, unpublished MS.

  Chapter 9

  The Killing of

  George Cornell

  One large fly in the Kray ointment was the team run by the Richardson brothers from South London. Originally there were three brothers, Charlie, Eddie and Alan, but Alan had been killed in a boating accident on the Thames. The Twins had fallen foul of Charlie during their time in the military prison at Shepton Mallet when he had refused to kow-tow to them, but relations had improved and at one time Richardson was buying goods from the Kray Long Firm being run in Blenheim Gardens, South London.

  Now, through his associates such as the fraudster Brian Mottram, Charlie Richardson was himself running a series of Long Firm frauds south of the river. He had also expanded not only into the East End, the Kray stronghold, where another associate, George Cornell, had set up shop, but also an LF with Billy Stayton in Southend, which the Twins considered their territory.

  Although the West End, like Las Vegas and Miami, was regarded as neutral gang territory, there were also signs that the Richardsons were moving into Soho – for example, Eddie Richardson and Mad Frank Fraser were minding Charlie Chester’s Casino in Archer Street. In the days when blue films shown in cinemas generally consisted of buxom and naked German and Scandinavian ladies playing volleyball in long shot, the Richardsons, with the approval of certain police officers, had established a circuit in Bloomsbury of rather more explicit private showings. They were also feeding off a car parking fiddle at Heathrow, discovered by Eddie Richardson and Fraser on their return from a trip to Southport. Attendants were adjusting time clocks which marked tickets so it appeared the cars had been parked for a shorter time than they actually had and were pocketing the difference. The scam had been earning the attendants around £1,000 a week but now the Richardsons, after pointing out the undoubted benefits of their involvement and the inevitable danger of their not having a share, took half. The Twins believed they were getting far too powerful for their own good.

  One reputed Richardson enforcer was George Cornell, born in 1930 in the East End to an unmarried couple named Myers. His father, who was reputed to carry a Derringer, had been a member of the Watney Streeters and George Cornell grew up with the Krays.

  East End underworld folklore has it that in 1955 Cornell’s brother Myer ‘Johnnie’ Myers, then aged 45, killed a prostitute Nancy Wojtasko, throwing her over the balustrade in a block of flats at Norfolk Buildings, Shoreditch. He was indeed charged with her murder in what was a very odd case. The pair, who had been drinking heavily the night before, were found around 7 a.m. on the morning of 9 March at the bottom of the stairs in the block. She was wearing only stockings and a cardigan, while a coat and shirt had been thrown over her. She died in hospital that afternoon. She had been suffering from syphilis and was partially paralysed following a cerebral haemorrhage a few months earlier. Myers, who already had a number of convictions for assault, made various statements, saying they had been out drinking and she had fallen down the stairs around 1.30 a.m. He had not been able to lift her and had stayed with her until they were found. Other tenants claimed they had heard her call out ‘Don’t hit me!’ at around 3.30 a.m. One woman had looked out and seen the pair before going back to bed. She had brought Nancy a cup of tea when she found she was still there in the morning. It was agreed the lighting was bad and the stone staircase with its narrow steps was dangerous. A pathologist agreed she could have sustained the injuries from falling down the stairs a number of times. Myers was acquitted of both murder and manslaughter just over two months later.108

  George Cornell himself had served a three-year sentence for slashing a woman. Another brother, Jimmy, ran a drinking club, ‘Jim’s Inn’ off Watney Street market. The boys had later moved south of the river and at some time all except George had legally changed their name to Cornell. Nevertheless, by the 1960s he was known by the same name as his brothers.

  There was no love lost between the Krays and George. There had been bad blood between him and Ronnie Kray on a personal level. One story, hotly denied by Kray and his supporters, was that in the early 1960s Ronnie had called Cornell out of the Brown Bear public house in Aldgate and Cornell had promptly knocked him out.

  The Twins later claimed that they had looked after him on one of the occasions he had been released from prison, and had even given him new clothes and a pension.109 Despite the fact they had stepped in and taken over one of his LFs, they regarded him as something of a traitor in leaving his East End origins and defecting to the Richardsons when he married a south London girl. Worse, he had also refused to cut them in on the short-term blue film racket he was running in Bloomsbury with Fraser.

  At the time of his death in March 1966, in theory Cornell was a partner with Benny Saher in the Sombrero club in Ann Place off Oxford Street. In reality Cornell was minding Saher. He was also trying to persuade several perfume wholesalers in the East End that they needed protection. He was also believed to have been responsible for an arson attack in the area earlier in the month on 6 March. Other stories about him included one that he had killed a man in South Africa. Had he lived, he certainly would have been charged in the Richardson Torture Case along with the fraudster Brian Mottram.

  Although he has generally been painted as a ruthless thug, some people spoke well of Cornell. Former Kray associate, the thief Little Lenny Hamilton, remembered him:

  ‘When I went back to work in Billingsgate Fish Market at the age of twenty-six, Georgie Cornell looked
after me – he was the hardest man I ever saw on the cobbles but he had a heart of gold as well. He gave me five pounds to buy my mother some flowers and said, “Make sure you give her the fucking change!”… He used to line up all the tramps at the market and give them each half a crown and make sure they got a mug of tea and two slices of dripping toast. Then with the change, he’d say, “Now go down and buy yourselves a pint.”’110

  The barmaid Patricia Kelly who witnessed his killing also liked him:

  ‘I know the books that have been written have said George Cornell was a villain, but in the pub he was just so nice to me. He used to laugh at me about the records I used to play in the pub. I’ve no idea what the quarrel was about. People have always said it was because he called Ronnie “a big fat pouf”, but that was just George. If he’d had a few drinks he’d think that was comical and that others should think it was as well. Then again it has been said that Ronnie got upset because George had come on his manor. That can’t have been right. George was a regular drinker in the Beggars.’111

  The Twins’ overall fear was that the astute and far better organised Richardsons would muscle in on their enterprises, in particular a fledgling deal concerning stolen bonds they were negotiating with the American Mafia through Leslie Payne.

  By 1966 the Twins, in particular Ronnie, were becoming paranoid and members of the Firm were instructed to kill the essentially genial and gigantic Brian Mottram, more of a fraudster with a serious heart condition than a gangster. The difficulty was that apart from any scruples they might have had killing people, the death penalty was still operating and the rank and file were not too keen on putting themselves on offer. Fortunately for Mottram, none of the Firm really knew what he looked like and when a photograph of the Soho Rangers, a football team composed mainly of South London villains, was found, he was not on it.