by James Morton
Jenny King recalls to me:
‘Carol and Georgie left my house at about 3.30. Georgie was very drunk but Carol hadn’t been drinking because she was on pills for high blood pressure. Georgie was paralytic. I helped her get him downstairs and she said she could manage to get him across the street.
She had the keys to my place and I had hers. A bit before seven I felt her waking me up. She was green, just shaking from head to toes. I asked her what was wrong and she just blurted out, “Something terrible’s happened in my house. I think they’ve killed somebody.” I couldn’t believe it and I said, “What do you mean, tell me.”
What had happened was that when she got back with Georgie they’d been slung into the bedroom by the door. The rest of her flat was in the basement. She’d then heard someone say, “Don’t forget his hat.” That’s when she thought they’d killed Jack McVitie.
I asked her who was there that minute and she said she was on her own so I put some clothes on and went back with her. I’ve never seen anything so horrific. The walls were covered in blood; the carpet had been set on fire and was smouldering in the fireplace. She’d had it boarded up but the new fascia had been ripped off. There was blood all over the couch, and the window, where Jack had tried to get through, was smashed. The record player just wasn’t there.
I said, “Come back to my place and we’ll think about it.” Then I said, “Let’s get the kids and we’ll go to the police.” She said, “They’ll kill us” and I said, “They’ll kill us anyway.” So we just started to clean up and try and put the place in some semblance.
Georgie simply walked off. I rang her ex and another bloke I knew and said, “We’re bang in trouble. Come and give us a hand.”
As we came out John Barry, Tony’s brother pulled up and asked, “Is everything all right?” We just looked at him and said, “What do you mean?” but he didn’t reply and he just drove off. That was the start of things. The next day Carol said, “Don’t come over”.
The Twins sent Ian round to give Carol £40 to replace the three-piece suite and carpet. Then over the next week they sent more people in to redecorate it. In between times we were making it as decent as we could. By the end of the week the story was that Jack had blown himself up when he’d hit a bollard or something going over Tower Bridge; he’d had a load of dynamite in his car. But I noticed it wasn’t in the papers.’
In the days following the killing it was Albert Donoghue who redecorated and re-papered the Evering Road flat. Second hand furniture was brought in to replace the bloodstained carpet and sofa. A tight rein had to be kept on those outside the Firm who might cause problems, and if Jenny King thought she was out of the woods she was mistaken:
‘About four months later Winnie Harwood came over one lunchtime and said the Twins were at her house and they wanted to see me. I was terrified but there was no use in refusing. I had to go. They said I’d been talking out of turn but I stood my ground and said I hadn’t. I said I’d heard Jack had been killed when he’d blown himself up on Tower Bridge when he was carrying gelignite. They seemed satisfied but then they just told me that if I said anything I’d be killed. I said, “Can I go now?” and that was the last time I spoke to them.
They sent Winnie over a couple of days later with pens and books and sweets for the kids but I sent them back with her.
As close as Winnie was to the Twins, she was never pulled in to my knowledge, even though Pat Connolly lived at her place and kept a box of guns under the bed. She got Alzheimer’s disease and died a few years back.’153
For Sylvia McVitie, who had met Jack in November 1965 just after he had come out of Dartmoor, the worst was not knowing what had happened:
‘I searched for him in pubs and clubs but all I got were blank stares or lies. They were all too frightened to talk freely.’154
In the 1990 film The Krays he was played sympathetically by Tom Bell which reinforced the image of a rather weedy character. Freddie Foreman and Tony Lambrianou, Getting it Straight, p.101.
Frank Fraser, Mad Frank, pp. 155-157.
House of Commons Debate, 10 December 1959 vol. 615 cc. 896-906. McVitie was also said to have thrown a girlfriend out of his car. He claimed they were arguing when she fell against the door which opened.
Bobby Cannon was no relation of the West London Cannons. Ronald Hart, unpublished MS; Albert Donoghue, Gun in My Hand, p. 171.
Conversation with JM, 28 December 2012.
Ronnie Hart, Unpublished MS; David Jones, ‘The Great Kray Lie Yet again’, Daily Mail, 2 September 2000.
Conversations with JM, 2002-2015.
News of the World, 16 March 1969.
Chapter 12
Nipper Read and the
Second Investigation
In the latter half of 1967 Nipper Read received both good and bad news almost simultaneously. Since the abortive Kray inquiry of 1964 and the fiasco of the Hide-A-Way trial, Fred Gerrard had retired. Read’s career had been onward and upward, including a spell back in the West End breaking up gangs of pickpockets from Europe, Australia and South America who had arrived for the 1964 World Cup. Now it was time for another step up the ranks. The good news was that he was promoted to Superintendent. This normally meant four years on a Division and then, with luck, a transfer to C1, the elite Murder Squad. Read recalled, ‘I was promoted on the Friday and Hooter Millen said I would be told on the Monday by the Assistant Commissioner Peter Brodie where I was going’.
And on the Monday, there was more good news from Brodie who told Read he was going straight to the Squad. Read was delighted. He had pulled off a hat-trick: the first post-war Superintendent to be posted to the Murder Squad, the first ever to be promoted from Chief Inspector and the first to reach the Squad without serving a period of grace on a Division. The bad news was that it was to be on special assignment to bring down the Krays. Read recalled Brodie telling him:
‘The Krays have been a thorn in our sides for long enough. Now you can do it any way you like but I’m looking to you to get the right result. I know you will wish to run this thing entirely properly and fairly – I don’t even need to say that. It is important to nail these bastards.’155
Brodie added, ‘Always remember we are here to help in any way we can’. Later Read would think ‘hinder’ was a more appropriate verb. The likelihood of a leak was high, but for the time being the cover story was that he was conducting an inquiry into a major corruption allegation. This was by no means farfetched. In the days before the creation of A10, the squad investigating police corruption, Murder Squad officers often dealt with serious corruption allegations and there was certainly enough corruption around at the time to justify a major investigation.
What had been happening at Scotland Yard in the three years since the fiasco of the identification parades in the Cornell shooting? Not very much is the answer. In overall charge of the Kray investigation was the Munster lookalike, Assistant Commissioner John Du Rose, given the soubriquet ‘Four Day Johnny’ because he supposedly solved his cases in record time. In fact, a look through the cases in his anodyne autobiography rather belies the nickname, but he was involved in both the Jack the Stripper and the Haigh murder cases which, as far as Scotland Yard was concerned, reached successful conclusions. Although much more was due to Gerald MacArthur, Du Rose was also given a great deal of credit for bringing down the Richardsons.156
Du Rose’s version of events was:
‘Having formed the basic plan for a major investigation into the Kray “Firm”, I selected an officer to take charge of the affair. He was Ferguson Walker, a detective superintendent at Central Office whose knowledge of the underworld from Soho to the East End could prove decisive for the work in hand. He had had Flying Squad experience and at the time was a successful member of the Murder Squad.’157
Walker chose Detective Sergeant Algernon Hemingway as his assistant and, said Du Rose, ‘to their credit they never gave up tryin
g and after several months they got a line on the Krays which indicated “the investigation was off the ground”.’
Although John Du Rose wrote in his memoirs that Ferguson Walker had been doing a good job keeping tabs on the Krays after the Cornell murder and the disappearance of first Frank Mitchell and then Jack McVitie, Read believed it was very far from the reality.
The truth, believed Read, was that somehow information was being leaked to the Krays’ great friend, the club owner Bernie Silver, head of what was called ‘The Syndicate’, which ran clubs and porn in Soho during the 1960s and who had many of the Obscene Publications Squad under his control.
Throughout his career Read continually ran up against Walker, rarely with satisfactory results. I remember him telling me that when he was at Paddington as a Sergeant, one day Walker called in on Read who asked:
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m sent by the Yard. I’m special intelligence gatherer.’
‘What are you gathering?’
‘I’m the best-informed officer in the Met Police’.
An irritated Read replied, ‘Why don’t you go and fucking nick someone then?’
At the time Scotland Yard was in one of its worst periods and Read wanted certain precautions to be put in place. First he wanted to move the Kray inquiry away from the Yard itself, where he feared there could be serious and compromising leaks. He wanted to base it at Tintagel House on Westminster Bridge. Secondly, he wanted to pick his own team who he knew were clean, trustworthy and who would be loyal to him. This was all agreed, but for the first three months, Read’s team comprised only himself and two sergeants. Read was appalled by the lack of anything on the files which indicated any action had been taken:
‘There was not one single item added to the wealth of stuff I had put in during my Commercial Street days. We had put in a ton of stuff and I believed it was important we did so. Now I found to my dismay that there wasn’t another single fact in there.’158
Among reports which were missing was the contact Bobby Teale had made with the detective Tommy Butler after the Cornell shooting. It was something which would cause Read some problems at the trial.
What is certain is that in the best traditions of Scotland Yard of the time, Read was not dealt a full hand of cards. Du Rose, who was running a parallel investigation into the Krays, kept a great deal back from him and also suborned at least one of the men working for him.
There had certainly been some activity under Butler. Some weeks after the Krays had arrived locust-like at David Teale’s flat, his brother Bobby contacted New Scotland Yard and according to his account was put through to Tommy Butler. A meeting was arranged in Fleet Street and it was decided that Teale was to be ‘run’ by Detective Sergeant Joe Pogue. In his book Teale recalls a number of meetings but seemingly there were no records kept of Teale’s involvement and when it came to the trial, Ronnie’s QC, John Platts-Mills, was able to put a number of names of which he had no records to an embarrassed Read. Quite how the Krays’ solicitors came to know of these is another matter.
DS Ferguson Walker had actually been fairly active. The former Flying Squad officer John Rigbey recalled that Walker had overheard him talking with his informer Charlie Clarke on a telephone intercept and Walker wanted to know all about it. It would seem, however, that Walker made no use of the information, except possibly to pass it on to Silver for onward transmission. Rigbey recalled:
‘Charlie Clarke was a cat burglar who lived in a bungalow behind the Walthamstow dog track. Someone tipped me off that he had stolen goods but when I turned him over there was nothing. What he did have, however, was a rail of clothes like you see in shops which had a row of Ronnie Kray’s suits. He was staying there on and off. I managed to turn Charlie and he gave me good if selective information. It’s rare you find a thief who won’t turn grass. They all do it. Charlie wouldn’t grass up his friends but he didn’t mind doing it to other people. Once you have a grass, do it once then he’s yours. You can always put the black on him, saying you’ll leak it that he gave you such and such a person. I never went to see him. It was all done on the blower. One day I’m called in by my boss Frank Nicholl who tells me that Fergie Walker of C1 wants to see me. In those days C1 was serious crimes and also discipline so I wondered what went wrong. When I went to see him he’s like one of those Scots actors in Whisky Galore. What he wanted to know was if Charlie had said anything to me about the Twins or the others. He hadn’t but I realise that there must have been a bell on him.’159
Was Du Rose himself corrupt or simply an autocratic man who craved results? Read, who prefers the latter theory, recalled being told:
‘I shall want to see you at Morning Prayers. This was when he saw the head of the Murder Squad and the Head of the Flying Squad. I was the boy. All the others were pre-war men. I said to Tommy Butler, who was also waiting to see him, “I can’t afford to do this. I’ve other things to do.” Butler said, “Tell him.” So I said to Du Rose, “If you want to see me, call in at Tintagel on the way home.” He called occasionally but he had to ring first to make sure I was there.’160
This did not endear Read to Du Rose or make the latter any keener on sharing his information.
By now Read’s tactics had improved and he made a positive decision not to attempt to investigate the rumoured murders, but again to look at the Long Firm frauds the Twins had been running through Leslie Payne. There was no point in simply picking off one or two people. While the Twins and other senior members of the Firm were at large he would never get people to talk about the murders. It had to be a clean sweep.
He began his inquiries by making a numbered list of people whom he should interview. Some such as Frank Shea (No. 3) and Sylvia McVitie (26) were known to be bitter enemies of the Twins. Others were the ex-boxer Johnny Cardew (20) whom he knew had been attacked by Ronnie Kray; some, such as Bill Ackerman (7), Bobby Ramsey (9), and Bill Exley (24), had worked for the Firm. Yet more were people whose businesses had been appropriated, including Freddy Gore (4), Leslie Payne (12) and Johnny Hutton (8). Despite their subsequent claims that it was they who had brought down the Krays, possibly because Read had not been given the full information about them, the Teale brothers were not in the top 30. First on the list was Lanni, the former owner of the Cambridge Rooms.
Read decided simply to talk to men he knew from the first investigation; peripheral members of the Firm who for one reason or another might have drifted away. He met with many rejections, but eventually in December a meeting was arranged with Payne, whom he had known for years, at the Lyons Corner House next to Charing Cross Station. The Krays’ use of gratuitous violence had begun to upset Payne, not least the botched attempt on his own life by Jack McVitie. He was a swindler, not a killer. Read promised that if Payne helped him, so far as he was able he would ensure the fraudster was not prosecuted. Payne began to talk on the proviso that no one at the Yard was told.
Over a three-week period in a hotel in Paddington, Read took a 146-page statement from Payne covering the sale of drugs, blackmail, stolen bonds, Long Firm frauds and forged currency. Payne also began to name names including his one-time partner Freddy Gore, who had been involved in the Krays’ LFs, and the attempt to establish a housing project in Nigeria. Payne and Gore told Read the Twins had been dealing in bonds stolen from deposit boxes in America and Canada and sold by the thieves to the Mafia, who in turn were using the Firm to cash them in Europe.
One by one, fringe members of the Firm and their victims began to talk to Read, who would often take the smooth-talking Payne with him to establish his credentials. One early convert was Lennie Hamilton, who had lost his hair at Esmeralda’s Barn. Another was the old boxer Billy Exley, who would tell him of the Mitchell escape.
Exley had fallen foul of the Twins when they used him as the dupe in a plan to swindle two businessmen. According to a report he forgot his lines and leaned over to Reggie, ask
ing, ‘What do I say?’ The businessmen promptly shut down the discussion. He was summoned to Vallance Road and told that he would forfeit his ‘pension’ of £10 a week for two months. He annoyed the Twins again by then joining a Turkish Cypriot gang. He never returned to the fold. When Read first went to see him in early December 1967 he found him with a loaded shotgun. ‘If they come looking for me I’ve a shotgun behind the door and that’s what they’ll get. Don’t worry, it’s licensed,’ he told Read.161
In the middle of his inquiries Read was sent to investigate the murder of Peggy Flynn, a middle-aged prostitute found dead in February 1966 on a beach in Dublin. She had been strangled with one of her stockings.162 No progress was made in the case until a British army officer suddenly confessed in December 1967. In a way this was convenient because it enabled Read to keep his cover that he was simply on the Murder Squad. It was time-consuming, however, and meant he had to attend the ensuing trial in Dublin the following March. In the end the jury rejected his confession and the officer was acquitted. When Read returned he found the hierarchy at the Yard had leaked news of his inquiry to the press. The Sunday Mirror featured the headline, ‘Gangbusters Move in on the Top Mob’ followed by the news that Read was investigating the murders of Cornell, McVitie and Mitchell. And, with the Richardsons safely serving sentences, it could only refer to the Firm. It was yet another example of inopportune leakage, if not sabotage, by Scotland Yard.
As for the murders, Read faced considerable problems. In Cornell’s case, no one was prepared to make an identification. There were no bodies in the other two. For centuries, after the Camden Wonder case in 1661 when a victim had turned up alive and well a few weeks after his ‘killers’ had been hanged, the law had been taken to be ‘no body – no murder’. In 1948, however, when a Polish farmer had killed his business partner over a land ownership dispute, it became clear that given sufficient circumstantial evidence – in this case blood splattering – it was possible to convict without a body.163 But there was still the problem for Read that without hard evidence a jury might not believe that either McVitie or Mitchell was dead.