by James Morton
In all, 18 appeared at Bow Street court that morning. In addition to the Krays, stalwarts Tommy Cowley, Charlie Mitchell, Tommy Brown, Charlie Clarke, Alf Willey, Billy Exley and Sammy Lederman were in the dock along with a number of others charged with fraud. There were no immediate applications for bail for the Twins and Charlie. Their biographer John Pearson had approached Read volunteering to stand as surety for the Twins, but Read told him he should wait until he heard some of the evidence, which might make him change his mind. Most of the fraudsters were released to appear in due course. Joseph Kaufman, however, was remanded in custody.
There were still major players at large. Donoghue had been staying with a girl and so avoided the police when they called at his home the morning of the swoop. Later that morning he went round to the Krays at Bunhill Row and found the police there. He told them his name was Barry, that he had a minicab firm and had come to have the Twins settle their account. The police let him go.
Ronnie Hart was another who had avoided arrest. On the morning of the police raids on the Krays he had gone to Bunhill Road to discuss the potential killing of a bookmaker. He had seen the door off its hinges and left. Later he and Albert Donoghue went to stay in a caravan in Poole. After two weeks they split up and Hart and his girlfriend Vicki James went to live in Ashford, Kent, where he was sent a message that he was to stay until he heard from Freddie Foreman. Donoghue’s version was that they stayed in London collecting protection money, before heading to Sussex rather than Kent. He returned to Bethnal Green and stayed in a flat with Dickie Morgan where they were both arrested. According to Mickey Bailey, Donoghue had approached him to see whether the receiver Tony ‘The Magpie’ Maffia could smuggle him out of the country by boat but nothing came of the plan, possibly because Maffia was shot and killed within the month.5
Until 1967 all committal proceedings could be reported in detail. A change in the law then meant that proceedings could only be reported on the application of the defence. However, if one wanted the ban lifted, everybody suffered. On 17 May Paul Wrightson (defending Reggie) asked for the ban to be lifted at this early stage. Quite what induced him to do so is unclear. At that time no actual murder charges had been laid and, presumably against all advice, Reggie had insisted. The other thought is that with a rather nebulous conspiracy to murder and some uninteresting fraud charges, he wanted to expose the police case as weak and garner some sympathy for oppressed defendants everywhere. Whatever the reason, it backfired spectacularly.
At first, the remand hearings leading up to the committal proceedings seemed to go well for the Krays and they received some favourable copy in the newspapers. The police were holding back on the so far unnamed man whom the Krays had allegedly conspired to murder. They were balancing the protection of vulnerable witnesses on the one hand with the right to confront one’s accuser on the other. It was, in fact, all a game acted out to obtain favourable press coverage. And with every refusal to disclose the name of the potential victims, sympathy for the Twins mounted.
The defence wished to know who the victims were, and Ivan Lawrence (defending Ronnie) quipped that if one of them was Santa Claus, bail would have to be allowed. Five weeks later on 14 June he was still trying: ‘For the sixth time I rise to my feet to allow the officer in the case to answer the question, “What are the names of the two persons in the conspiracy to murder charges?”’ And for the sixth time the sitting magistrate replied it was an inappropriate question for a remand hearing. Eventually an application was made to the Divisional Court to order the Director of Public Prosecutions to release the names, which he did the day before the next hearing. As expected, one of the two names was George Caruana, the Soho Maltese club owner. The other was Jimmy Evans, the alleged attacker of Freddie Foreman’s brother George.
But well before then, things had improved for Read in the Frank Mitchell case. On 13 May, the Daily Express had run a headline, ‘Krays – New Moves Today’. As a result Frank Mitchell’s minder, Lennie ‘Books’ Dunn, believing that it referred to him, walked into West Ham police station, Read was informed of this immediately, but by the time he arrived, Dunn had already made a suicide attempt, convinced the Krays were out to get him. His fears were probably justified. There had been a plan to throw him from the 14th floor of the block of flats where he lived.6
Now a terrified Dunn gave details of the time when Frank Mitchell had stayed at his flat. Dunn had always wanted to be a friend of the Krays but after a dose of the limelight with the arrival of the ‘Mad Axeman’, he realised he preferred anonymity.
At first Read did not believe his tale of watching Mitchell copy out the letters written for him, of the arrival of Lisa the nightclub hostess, of the final moments of Mitchell’s life and the frantic clearance of the flat, but as Dunn provided more and more detail he became convinced it was true. Read’s next problem was that Dunn was at best an accomplice. Read and his team had to find corroborating witnesses. Billy Exley provided some help, but he too was an accomplice and by the time of the trial was himself serving a sentence for attempted murder. The best option would be to try to find Lisa before the Krays got to her.
In the end it was Frank Cater who traced her through good old-fashioned police work. Exley knew he had taken her to Bayswater when she went to pick up some clothes and he pointed out the house. Cater spoke with the then tenant and she confirmed Lisa came from ‘up north’ and had stayed with her for 18 months, but around Christmas one year she had gone away for a week and refused to say where she had been. Cater asked if she knew Lisa’s doctor, but all she knew was that she had once had been taken ill at the West London Air Terminal on the Cromwell Road. Cater traced the hospital to which she had been taken and they provided details of her mother in Leeds. A photograph of her taken at Winstons was sent by train. Her mother identified her and told the police that Lisa was living in Battersea, but was planning to travel to Australia in a motor caravan with her boyfriend. When Cater went to the flat, he was told she had left, but the motor caravan was being repaired in Paddington before they took it abroad. Cater traced it, and the garage owner told him the Australian owner was staying somewhere in Earl’s Court and had hired a Ford Transit van with a Stuyvesant cigarette advertisement on a door. Cater found the van parked outside a small bed and breakfast hotel, went in and woke Lisa up, telling her he was from Scotland Yard and his visit was about Frank Mitchell.
She was driven to Scotland Yard with Cater and Sergeant Bert Trevette. It was a smooth journey until, on Lambeth Bridge on the way to Tintagel House, Lisa panicked and tried to get out of the car. She had realised she was not going to Scotland Yard and thought Cater and Trevette were Kray men flashing her a fake warrant card. Pulled back in, she then asked to see Cater’s hands. When she examined them she was convinced they were not workman’s hands and calmed down. Although technically she could have been said to be an accomplice in the escape, she was now the witness who provided sufficient evidence for charges to be brought. By 31 May Read was in a position to lay specific murder charges, the first of which was the murder of Frank Mitchell. The committal proceedings began on 26 June.
Defections among the ranks were to be expected, but Read never thought the first one would be the dog doper and fraudster Charlie Mitchell, whom he had thought to be ‘a real hard nose’. Nevertheless his wife telephoned Read, who went to see him on the afternoon of 5 June. Apart from giving details of stolen bond transactions he also said there was a contract out on both Read himself and Leslie Payne. He, Mitchell, had been approached in the exercise yard at Brixton by Tommy Cowley, to find the money, said to be £5,000, to pay for the black New York hitman ‘Junior’ who had a panther tattooed on his arm. Killing Read and Payne was a step too far for an extortionist and dog doper.
Read checked the story and independently received a call from a colleague saying he had been to see one of his snouts in Brighton and the word was that Mitchell’s story should be taken seriously. There was also corroborat
ion because when one of the defendant’s cells was searched, a series of messages were found instructing someone called ‘Junior’ to ‘do the business’. Read next contacted Alden McCray, head of the FBI in Europe, who told him such a man did exist in the States. Read, who drove to Tintagel House every day, began to change his route and to look under his car before he started it. Eventually ‘Junior’ was stopped at Shannon airport and sent back home. Charlie Mitchell went on to make a complete statement and on 25 June when Kenneth Jones, appearing for the Director of Public Prosecutions, told the magistrate, ‘It has been decided he should be used as a prosecution witness’. It came as a body blow to the Twins.
Read recalled:
‘Mitchell walked from the back row [of the dock] as though he was going to collect a prize at a Sunday School. Even then the Twins could not believe what was going on. It was only later that they realised the full implication of the betrayal, and, by then it was too late for them to show their displeasure in a tangible way.’7
After Charlie Mitchell’s disappearance into the witness protection scheme, Ronnie sent for the diminutive receiver Stan Davis:
‘What Ronnie wanted to know was where Charlie [Mitchell] was, and I was to find out. I was living in Clapham at the time and I went to Brixton. I’d given a false name at the gate but the next day I had a visit from the police. “Why had I given a moody name?” I told them I didn’t want to give my own and they left it at that, but it put me off and I didn’t do anything about finding Charlie. I never saw Ronnie again.’8
From then on there was a steady trickle of defendants who wanted to see Read or Henry Mooney. Scotch Jack Dickson had been picked up in an East End pub a few weeks after the sweep and was charged with harbouring Frank Mitchell. He soon said he would plead guilty and made a statement to Mooney. Unfortunately many of the others were either unable to make substantial contributions or were still sitting on the fence. They included Connie Whitehead, who said he would make a statement if Read could guarantee to protect his wife and son. Read said he could arrange protection whether he made a statement or not. No statement was ever made but Whitehead told him that Ronnie had said, ‘Me and Reggie done McVitie. He tried to make us look silly and he was getting too flash anyway.’ At the time Ronnie had a flick knife and he told Whitehead to ‘keep your mouth shut or I will stick this in your head’. Whitehead also told Read that McVitie had been given £100 in the Grave Maurice to kill Payne and there was the promise of a further £400 on completion.
On 31 May Reggie and Donoghue had been charged with the murder of Frank Mitchell. Ronnie, Charlie Kray, Connie Whitehead, Tommy Cowley, Wally Garelick, Scotch Jack Dickson and Pat Connolly were all charged with harbouring Mitchell or helping in his escape.
On 5 July Charlie Kray and Connie Whitehead were found to have no case to answer on the charge that they murdered Frank Mitchell. That left the Twins and Donoghue on the murder charge and the others on harbouring and helping him escape charges.
31 May had also been the day when Robin Simpson, applying for bail for Joseph Kaufman, pressed Read as to why the police were objecting. There was a certain amount of ducking and diving between them as Read tried to avoid answering the question, but as Simpson pressed on, the worse it became for him. ‘Well what is it? Let us have it out. Let us be honest, let us have the truth,’ said Simpson.
In bail applications there was no such thing as the hearsay rule. The police could rely on fact, gossip and speculation in equal parts. The answer, said Read, was:
‘The suggestion made by my colleagues in America is that he is a member of an organisation known as the Mafia and that he is already suspected of offences in America, and if he is granted bail he will be arrested when he arrives in America.’9
End of bail application.
The next week Kaufman told the magistrate, Kenneth Barraclough, that he had been a spy for the FBI. ‘I have pretended to be a communist and have attended meetings and reported back to the FBI in New York.’ He still went back to Brixton.
As for the fraudsters, one of the first to be arrested had been the disbarred barrister Stanley Crowther who complained that he had been left holding the baby. ‘A singularly unattractive baby,’ said the committing magistrate Geraint Rees, wittily. At the end of June Crowther received 15 months for fraudulent trading. He claimed he had only been a clerk earning £15 a week in a company which was running up losses of over £24,000. Who was behind it, then? ‘It is more than my life is worth to tell you.’ Nevertheless he had made a very long and detailed, if often self-serving statement to the police.
As for the Cornell murder, John Alexander ‘Ian’ Barrie was not arrested until 29 June at the British Oak Public House in the Lea Bridge Road. At the time he told Henry Mooney:
‘I feel sick. I have been like an animal for some days. I knew you would come for me, and such a lovely day too. I did not shoot Cornell. I wish I could tell you what happened but I would get shot.’
Five days later, on 4 July, he was put on an identification parade over the Cornell murder. Police officers Henry Mooney and Pat Allen had been nursing the barmaid and her family for the past weeks, taking her and the children to Heathrow. While Allen took the children to watch the planes landing and taking off, Mooney, exercising all his Irish charm, coaxed the barmaid into believing the police could, in fact, protect her from the Firm. Finally, just about the only one of the civilian witnesses without a prior conviction, she agreed to co-operate.
Barrie had originally had Bernie Perkoff as his solicitor, but the Krays had made him change to Sampson & Co. Now it was Ralph Haeems who attended to watch the parade on his behalf. The barmaid was sat down at a table and each of the men on the line-up – with lint and sticking plaster by their right ears because Barrie had a scar – had to stop in front of the table and turn before walking back to the line. After they had all completed the exercise the officer in charge of the parade asked if she wanted to see anyone again and she said, ‘Number Five,’ before she realised she had miscounted, and said, ‘No. Number Six [Barrie].’ Haeems then claimed the barmaid had said she was not certain Barrie was the man with Ronnie, so statements were taken from all the other men on the parade who confirmed her identification of Barrie.
Ronnie and Ian Barrie were committed for trial on the Cornell murder charge on 17 July.
By that time the committal proceedings on other charges were in full swing, with Alan Bruce Cooper telling magistrate Kenneth Barraclough how he, Elvey and Split Waterman had devised the suitcase plot. He, Cooper, was to receive £1,000 for the contract. By now Caruana had sensibly left the country and, the court was told, was not likely to return. When Kenneth Jones, opening the case for the prosecution, gave an outline of Elvey’s likely evidence, Reggie leaped to his feet to ask, ‘Excuse me, sir, is James Bond going to give evidence in this case?… this is ridiculous’. The magistrate, Kenneth Barraclough, told him to sit down. Eventually he decided the Caruana and Evans cases were too fanciful for a jury, and in turn the prosecution decided not to proceed on these charges.
Back in Brixton things did not go well for Kaufman, where on 13 September he was given a belting by Reggie Kray in the D Wing recreation room. He had been telling Reggie that as a defensive measure he should take a summons out against Cooper. Reggie had said, ‘Leave me alone. I don’t want to know.’ Kaufman had replied, ‘You Limey bums, you got no balls.’ Other prisoners at the scene told the police they thought Kaufman so angry he was going to attack Reggie, and very sensibly Kray had hit him first. Kaufman suffered a fractured nose and left cheekbone. After a trip to hospital, he was transferred to another prison. No charges followed.
Nor were things going well on the domestic front for Reggie. ‘Ginger Carole’ Thompson, to whom he had given tickets for the trial, had abandoned ship. He had, he claimed, given her £1,750 out of £5,000 he had received from a newspaper, but when he found another man’s clothes mixed in with the clean laundry she sen
t him, he decided she had been unfaithful. This was little harsh considering the fact he had been found in bed with another woman at the time of his arrest.10
There was, however, one shaft of light. Reggie and Charlie applied for permission to take evening classes in French, presumably so that if they ever escaped or were given bail they would be able to ask, ‘Où est le train for Paris?’ It was granted, subject to there being no more than three men in the class.
Overall, prison security was not that tight. Chris Lambrianou claimed that in early August he also turned up, signed the visitor’s book as Mickey Mouse, Disneyland, and was allowed in to see the pair.
With all the negative publicity, Paul Wrightson, representing Ronnie, tried to have the reporting ban restored, but was turned down by the Bow Street Magistrates and the Divisional Court. Unable to believe their good fortune, the papers lovingly continued to report on the Mitchell killing.
But the biggest catch for Read was Albert Donoghue and that was wholly the fault of the Twins and Manny Fryde. In July Donoghue had been making notes to give to Fryde who was representing him, and one day he was called to the solicitors’ visiting room and there he found the Twins, Charlie and Fryde. According to Donoghue he produced the notes, which Reggie took from him and ripped up. Fryde excused himself, saying he would go and get another chair despite the fact they already had one each. While he was out of the room Ronnie told Donoghue that Scotch Jack Dickson was going to hold his hands up for the Cornell murder; Ronnie Hart would wear the McVitie murder and he [Donoghue] was to accept that he had shot Mitchell. What the Twins did not know was that Hart and Dickson had already turned.