by James Morton
Then in the spring of 1968 came a substantial breakthrough. On 8 March Read received a call that a female informant wanted to see him urgently. A meeting was arranged for the next day at the Sir Christopher Wren, a pub near St Paul’s Cathedral. There Read learned some details of the McVitie murder. The woman knew it had taken place in Evering Road in a basement flat owned by a blonde woman with two children. With Sergeant Pat Allen, whom Read later married, and another woman officer, posing as door-to-door detergent market researchers, he was able within two days to provide Read with the house number and the name, Carol Skinner. Frank Cater, now seconded to Read’s squad, already knew Carol from a drugs case in 1964 when her then husband Colin had received three years. Her maiden name had been on the label of one of the suitcases used to carry the drugs. But from past experience Read knew all too well that seemingly staunch witnesses could be turned, and for the moment the information was put in cold storage.
After the Twins’ arrest, Carol Skinner was brought to Tintagel House, where she flatly denied any knowledge of McVitie’s death and was sent away. The Krays might have been locked up but they still held a tight grip on the minds of East Enders.
It is curious that neither the Twins nor any other Firm member (with the exception of the Lambrianous) made any attempt to leave London, let alone the country, at this stage. They seemed like rabbits trapped in headlights. It was almost as if a pall of inevitability was hanging over them. ‘They didn’t think,’ said Micky Fawcett dismissively. ‘Their idea of escape was to move from Bethnal Green all the way to Finsbury Park.’
According to Albert Donoghue there was idle talk that the troubles of the rank and file would be over if the Twins were killed. Years later Freddie Foreman confirmed that members were planning to kill the brothers just before their arrests:
‘The Twins were a nuisance and causing grief for everyone else. Some people felt they had to go. If they hadn’t been nicked then they would have gone missing very soon afterwards – forever.’164
However, the Twins did have vague plans to deal with Dukey Osborne, whom they believed was talking to the police. Donoghue recalled:
‘It was how Dukey Osborne fell out with the Krays. They wanted a fellow silenced. They thought he was talking to Nipper Read. Osborne was in Pentonville with him at the time. I went to see him and suggested he put something in the man’s tea or his food, but he refused and they were not pleased.’165
Then matters became urgent. It was through Leslie Payne that Read learned the details of the Twins’ involvement with the American Mafia and their dealing in stolen bonds. Through him he learned the name Alan Bruce Cooper and it opened up a whole new line of inquiry.
As with many others, the English-born Alan Bruce Cooper, small and with a pronounced stammer, little hair and a penchant for large cigars, came to the Krays in a roundabout way. A man of whom it was said that he would shop anyone to ensure his own survival, he had once grassed up his father-in-law Harry Nathan. Read had, in fact, seen him at Bow Street court watching the unfortunate Nathan’s committal proceedings, which ended in a seven-year sentence for conspiring to manufacture LSD.
Even now, nearly half a century later, it is still not clear in just whose pocket Alan Bruce Cooper could be found or for whom he was working; certainly for Scotland Yard in the shape of Du Rose and for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), who had also turned him.
Cooper had originally met Charlie Kray through the dog doper and fraudster Charlie Mitchell. Cooper had then been introduced to the well-connected American Joseph Kaufman by Charlie Kray at the Colony in August 1966. At the time Mitchell was in possession of stolen Canadian bearer bonds and was trying to sell them for 50 per cent of their face value. Cooper, who had offices in Albemarle Street off Piccadilly, told him they were worthless.
According to Cooper everyone was swindling everyone else. The Krays claimed they had bought stolen bonds at 35% of face value, when in fact they paid 25%. They now wanted 60% and Cooper’s associate, Heinz Pollman, said he could get the 60% but should tell the Krays he could only get 50% – Pollman and Cooper would then receive an extra 10% plus commission from the Krays. Pollman actually sold the bonds for 95%!
After a delay in the money filtering through, Reggie, Charlie and others were regular visitors to Cooper’s Albemarle Street offices, demanding to know where it was.
It was Cooper who thought up the 1966 takeover of the stock market-quoted company New Brighton Tower Ltd, which owned the Victoria Sporting Club off the Edgware Road and was run by the crooked solicitor Judah Binstock, who had at one time acted for the remnants of the Messina brothers empire. There had been troubles in the club and the Krays were brought in to sort out the problems. However, once in they stayed, and the straight clientele began to drift away as they had done from Esmeralda’s. It was after an associate Jack Dawson-Ellis was badly beaten that Binstock brought in members of the Corsican mafia who had interests in casinos on the south coast to explain to the Krays why they should withdraw.
The Krays wanted more, and on a bond-collecting trip to Montreal, Charlie Kray, Leslie Payne and others travelled on a plane which by chance carried a number of Playboy Bunnies. Unfortunately the mood turned sour when most were refused entry and kept in custody overnight. Rather than contest the matter, they took the option of being refused entry and were returned in rather less style.
In November 1965 Charlie Kray, Cooper, Payne and new boy to bond-smuggling Freddy Gore went to Paris to meet American Mafiosi and collect forged bearer bonds. According to Charlie Kray, Gore lost his nerve and said he couldn’t carry the bonds; Leslie Payne said it wasn’t part of the deal that he should do so and Charlie was left to bring them through Heathrow himself. It is probable that this was the final straw for the Krays as far as Payne was concerned. It was time for him to go, and McVitie was instructed to kill him.166
Shortly before the roof fell in, Ronnie, Cooper and the Twins’ old friend Dickie Morgan went to New York in early April 1968. There were to be negotiations over final approval of the book John Pearson was writing about the twins for which McGraw Hill had paid a $25,000 advance. And Ronnie wanted to meet a number of old-time boxers. Quite how they managed to overcome the fact that four years earlier Ronnie had been denied entry is a matter of speculation. Almost certainly it was stage managed by John Du Rose in an attempt to incriminate New York’s Gallo brothers. Under Du Rose’s direction Cooper took Ronnie Kray and Morgan to Paris, where they stayed the night at the Hotel Chateau Frontenac off the Champs Elysees. The next day they were given visas at a purported branch of the American Embassy there.
They already knew Joseph Kaufman who had been bringing over 700 punters a month on gambling junkets to the Colony and the Victoria Sporting Club. The players were charged $280 for their fares and hotels and Kaufman added another $280 to be split between himself and the Krays. Now Kaufman met Ronnie and the others at the airport.167 They stayed at the Hotel Warwick and he took them to Gallagher’s Steakhouse off Broadway, where they met some of Kray’s boxing heroes, including Rocky Graziano. Also there was the former boxer turned mobster Frank ‘Punchy’ Illiano, a capo of ‘Crazy’ Joey Gallo’s crew who owned what Kaufman described as a ‘pouf’ club, The Mousetrap, on Broadway where he took Ronnie.168
In Villains We Have Known Reggie Kray has a more romantic version of Ronnie’s meeting with Punchy Illiano. He claims Ronnie and Kaufman went to a small café in New York’s Little Italy and there Ronnie introduced himself to Edmondo, a dwarf mascot to the Gallo Family, who was outside. Ronnie was taken into the café and was introduced to Illiano, who checked him out. In a matter of moments Ronnie was surrounded by Gallo Family members including Al, one of the brothers, who apologised that his brother Joe was away on business while a third, Larry, was dying of cancer in hospital. Otherwise they would both have come to greet him. It is likely most of the men there were not the genuine article, but actors hired by Cooper to pla
y the part.169
It was now Cooper arranged for Kaufman to deal in $160,000 worth of bonds. According to Kaufman, Cooper said that the bonds were straight but, in fact, they had been stolen from the New York office of a firm of lawyers in January that year. Later Kaufman arranged for them to be sent to the Mayfair Hotel in London where he was staying.
In late April 1968 Cooper was summoned to The Horns and told by the Krays that two of their enemies were to be killed the next weekend. One was the Maltese club owner George Caruana, who had offended the Kray’s friend, the pornographer and club owner Bernie Silver. Silver had merely wanted Caruana to be given a beating, but the Krays believed it would be better for everyone if Caruana was dead. His continued existence and their apparent inability to do anything about it was showing them up. The other enemy was Jimmy Evans, who, in a domestic dispute, had had the temerity to shoot Freddie Foreman’s brother George in the groin. Caruana was to be blown up when he started his car and Jimmy Evans was to be stabbed with a poisoned syringe, symbolically at the Old Bailey. There were certain problems with both initiatives. First, gelignite had to be obtained and secondly, even in the days when security was effectively non-existent, how was a syringe to be smuggled into the Old Bailey in such a way that the user could escape? How could Cooper help?
The answer to both problems was Eugene Paul Elvey, a one-time hairdresser, whose real name was Levy. In his early days he had worked with the smuggler Michael Kendrick taking gold to India and Cairo. He was already deeply involved with the Krays. Around the time of the death of Frances Kray he had agreed to hurt the wife of a West London smuggler as a punishment for informing on her husband. He then told Tommy Cowley he would give the Krays the money to have it done for him. Reggie turned down the offer.170
Leonard Read, Nipper, The Man who nicked the Krays, pp. 133-4.
For the Jack the Stripper case see Chapters 21-22. Between 1944 and 1948 Haigh, who was known as the acid bath murderer, poisoned a number of mostly elderly people and then dissolved their bodies in acid. Unfortunately for him, an identifiable gallstone survived the acid and he was convicted and hanged in 1949.
John Du Rose, Murder was my Business, pp. 126 et seq.
Leonard Read, ibid p.144.
Conversation with JM, 16 April 2015.
Leonard Read Nipper, The Man who Caught the Krays.
Lennie Hamilton, Branded; Leonard Read, ibid, p 146.
Nat. Arch. MEPO 2/10935.
Nat. Arch. Assi. 84/170; 94/48.
Gemma Mullin, ‘The Kray Twins were both GAY’, Mail Online, 26 July 2014.
Conversation with JM, 7 September 2012.
Colin Fry with Charlie Kray, Doing the Business, Ch. 10.
Nat. Arch. MEPO 2/11101.
Frank Illiano was reputed to be one of the men who shot Albert Anastasia in the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York on 25 October 1957. Illiano died of natural causes in 2014 aged 86. He had lived for many years with a bullet in his head fired by a sniper as he stood by a hot dog stand in 1974.
John Pearson, The Cult of Violence, p. 133.
Nat. Arch. MEPO 2/11101.
Cooper took the opportunity to tell Elvey about the plot to kill Caruana and that Charlie and the Twins were putting pressure on him. He asked Elvey to fly to Glasgow to collect some dynamite. So on 30 April 1968, unaware he was in Nipper Read’s sights, Elvey took the Cunard Eagle flight to Glasgow, bought the gelignite and was waiting in the passenger lounge for the return flight when he was arrested by a senior customs officer.
Nipper Read was notified and immediately flew with Frank Cater to Glasgow, where Elvey initially denied any knowledge of the gelignite but then began to tell what was an almost unbelievable story.
Originally, said Elvey, it had been decided that Jimmy Evans should be shot with a crossbow and he had been commissioned to buy the weapon along with bolts and a telescopic sight for which he paid £51.2.3d. at Lillywhites, the sports outfitters in Piccadilly. When he found he was unable to shoot with the bow, the alternatives of a harpoon gun or a telescopic rifle were rejected and the syringe plot was devised. Cooper then contacted another friend, the gold and people smuggler and former ace speedway rider Francis Squire ‘Split’ Waterman, to make a suitcase which would go unnoticed at the Old Bailey. It would have a retractable syringe built into the leather.
According to Elvey’s statement to the police, he went to the White House hotel in Central London where Waterman showed him the case he had made, and they then took it to Charlie Kray at Grace Mansions. The pair, along with Waterman, went to the Old Bailey where Evans was watching a case but, according to Elvey, initially he was unsure they had the right man and then on the second occasion at the crucial moment his arm froze when about to use the syringe.
In the end Elvey’s reward for his cooperation was a fine for currency offences at Ealing Magistrates’ Court and the opportunity to atone for his sins in the witness box.
The next step was to arrest Cooper, but when Read did so he had a serious shock. When he was told he was to be charged with conspiracy to murder, Cooper nonchalantly asked to see Du Rose for whom, he said, he had been working as an informant and spy for two years. When Read confronted his superior:
‘I really let go at Du Rose and his reply was simply, “He never gave me anything substantial. I’d have let you know.” Du Rose must have had someone on my squad he was talking to.’1
In a matter of moments Cooper was transformed from an accused to a witness. Read later came to believe it was another member of the Squad, Henry Mooney, who had been running Cooper for Du Rose but from then on, Du Rose was rigorously excluded from any meeting in which confidential decisions were taken.
If Cooper simply disappeared off the streets, Read feared that the Krays would know he had been arrested and probably turned. His plan was therefore to put Cooper in a clinic in Weymouth Street to which Ronnie could be lured and where Read would be in the next room recording the conversation. The plan did not work. Ronnie rang to say he had been away and was tired. Instead of coming himself he would send over Tommy Cowley with some eggs – not quite what Read had hoped for. The one benefit was that while the tapes were running, Kaufman turned up to confirm he had arranged for the bonds to be sent to the Mayfair Hotel.2
On 6 May, the last night of liberty for the Twins, it really was a question of the ‘Gang’s All Here’. The party at the Astor showed that a slashing between friends could be forgiven because, according to Joseph Kaufman, some of the Cardew brothers were there along with the three Lambrianou brothers, Checker Berry, Scotch Ian Dickson, Dickie Morgan, Leslie Berman and Albert Donoghue. Members of the Firm thought there was an increased police presence in and around the club and took to going to the lavatory in pairs to avoid any possible fit ups. Orders were given that no photographs should be taken.3
The arrests were scheduled to happen simultaneously on the morning of 7 May. Read had been afraid that there might be a shoot-out with the police or that, pre-warned, the Krays might try to flee or to dispose of witnesses against them. This time there would be no opportunity for a leak.
Read telephoned the Detective Inspectors in each of the 10 branches of the Regional Crime Squads in the London area and asked them to have men available at short notice. The DIs had to telephone Read at midnight and, when they did, he told them to call back at 3.30 a.m. This time the men were told to report to Tintagel House in an hour’s time. Once the men arrived they were kept together until they were sent on the raids. Read reserved the arrests of the Twins for himself.
At 6 a.m. Algie Hemingway jemmied the front door of the flat at Bunhill Row. Two minders were in the front room and Reggie was in bed with a former girlfriend of Chris Lambrianou. Ronnie, in bed with a young boy, was amazingly sanguine. ‘Yes, all right, Mr Read, but I’ve got to have my pills, you know that,’ was his reply when he was read his rights. Back at West End Central, told he would be charged with conspiracy to murder an unnamed man, he ask
ed, ‘Did you remember my pills, Mr Read? I shall have to have them.’ Charlie Kray was arrested at his home. Kaufman was arrested that morning in the Mayfair Hotel, where some $190,000 worth of stolen bonds arrived a couple of days later.
After the Krays’ arrests the Commissioner held a celebratory drinks party at Scotland Yard, and who should be there but Ferguson Walker. Read was not pleased:
‘I went over to him and said, “What the fuck are you doing here?” He wouldn’t answer; he just looked away.’
Leonard Read, ibid, pp. 177-158.
In Murder without Conviction, John Dickson writes that Reggie Kray did indeed go to see Cooper but this is certainly not correct. Crime of the Krays Omnibus, pp. 139-140.
Kate Kray, The Krays, Free at Last, p. 15.
Chapter 13
The Committal
On 9 May 1968 The Times, reporting the arrests, was guarded:
‘The Kray Twins are well known in sporting circles in the East End where they have both distinguished themselves as amateur and professional boxers. With their brother they raised money for old people’s charities in the area.’
For the moment all Read had was two charges of conspiracy to murder an unnamed man, two of blackmail – demanding money from Payne and Gore – four of Long Firm frauds and one of grievous bodily harm. Holding charges only. Attack is often the best defence, and when Read charged Reggie with demanding with menaces and conspiracy to defraud he replied, ‘Yes, Mr Read. We’ve been expecting another frame-up for a long time. But this time we’ve got witnesses. There’s plenty of people will want to help us.’ Charlie Kray said, ‘I’ve never asked anybody for anything in my life, Mr Read.’4