by James Morton
Donoghue was horrified. He thought he might be killed if he did not go along with the scenario and he now wanted to see Read. His main worry, however, was that prison officers would tell the Twins that he’d asked to see the police. Therefore, when his mother came to visit him the next day, he passed her a screwed-up piece of paper saying he wished to see Read but not in the solicitors’ rooms. Read was given the note on 16 July and immediately telephoned Donoghue’s mother, who told him it was a matter of life and death. That evening he and Frank Cater went to see Donoghue in the prison hospital. There Donoghue told him that he had been set up to take the Mitchell murder and that if he did, ‘my wife and kids will be all right’. Afraid of being poisoned, he was now having his meals sent in. Over three days from 16 July Donoghue made what Read described as a ‘cold, clinical statement’ about Mitchell’s escape, harbouring and death at the hands of Alf Gerard. He was also able to bolster the case against them for the killing of McVitie, telling Read of the redecoration of Carol Skinner’s flat.
Read then introduced him to the solicitor Victor Lissack, a dead ringer for the actor Robert Morley. At a conference on 19 July between Read, David Hopkin of the DPP’s office and counsel Kenneth Jones, it was decided that for the time being Donoghue should still be charged with Mitchell’s murder. Later a decision could be taken whether to use him as a witness. In the meantime, he was moved first to Chelmsford, then to Maidstone and finally to Winson Green in Birmingham with a cover story that he had been sent there as a punishment for his non-cooperation with the police. The Krays obviously accepted this story at face value, because Reggie arranged a daily £5 payment to Donoghue’s mother, and provided transport whenever she wished to visit him.
Over the summer, one by one, the remaining members of the Firm were brought in or surrendered. Some, like the Lambrianous, dithered about on which side of the fence they would sit. On 7 August Chris, Tony Lambrianou and their brother Nicky had been found by West Midlands Police in Hart’s Hotel, Walsall where they were staying under false names, and Chris was brought to London.
Questioned by Read, he denied he had been at the Evering Road party and was released after Read had given him his card and said he should ring if he wanted to talk to him in the future. Ever the good soldier, Chris Lambrianou trotted round to the Twins’ parents in Bunhill Row, who persuaded him to go and see their sons in Brixton. He then went to see Manny Fryde at Sampsons and made a statement that he knew nothing about the McVitie murder and wanted to be left alone. After that he went back to Birmingham and was arrested a fortnight later on his way to the Elbow Room in Aston.
Then on 8 August, when Carol Skinner was taken to see Read again, she asked for protection. She broke down in tears and this time told him what had happened.
Her friend Jenny King told me:
‘Carol and I knew the police would come one day and we worked out how we would know if the other was helping them. So we agreed that we’d have a code. ‘It was the day they took the stereo back.’ That was the words Nipper Read used to me when he had me in to Tintagel after the Twins had been arrested. Up until then I’d said nothing but it was then I knew Carole had talked.’
Some, like Harry Hopwood, who had been the best man at Charlie Snr and Violet’s wedding, co-operated and were marked down as potential prosecution witnesses. Then at the end of August, Ronnie Hart’s cousin, Terence, went to Read to say he had been paying protection money to the Twins ever since Ronnie had escaped from prison. To find the money Terence Hart had embezzled around £4,500 from his employers, a car dealership in Ashford, and paid the money over to Ronnie Kray either in a pub near Vallance Road or in the lavatories at Charing Cross railway station. Read explained it was vital for him to see his cousin and on 2 September at 4.45 a.m. he had a call to say Ronnie Hart would come to Tintagel House in an hour’s time.
Once Hart began to tell his story of the McVitie killing, from the moment he was sent to tell Barrie to bring the gun in person to Evering Road, to the visit to Freddie Foreman to dispose of the body, Read knew he wanted him as a witness. John Dickson could not say what actually went on in the Blind Beggar; Donoghue could not say what had actually gone on at Evering Road; but Ronnie Hart could – never mind the fact he was also heavily incriminated in the McVitie murder. He was needed, and the ends were certainly going to justify the means. In turn Hart justified his defection on two grounds. First, there was his own self-preservation and that of his family. Secondly, and more righteously, was his discovery that Ronnie Kray had been leaning on his car salesman cousin Terence.11
During the week Read also saw the good Dr Blasker, who admitted treating various members of the Firm for gunshot wounds. He had not felt obliged to report the injuries to the police because his first loyalty was to the Kray family. They were private clients and, according to Donoghue, paid Blasker with a tenner and a bottle of spirits.
With Hart’s statement in the bag and the authority of the DPP to use him as a witness, on 11 September, Henry Mooney conducted another sweep. Chris Lambrianou was taken to London again where he continued to say he was not at Evering Road when McVitie was murdered.
Chris Lambrianou also denied he had set up McVitie and refused to answer questions about cleaning up 97 Evering Road. His brother Tony denied all knowledge of McVitie’s killing and said he had seen him around Christmas in the Balls Pond Road in North London, well after the time of the murder. Ronnie Bender denied being at the Evering Road party. All were charged with McVitie’s murder and sent to Brixton and elsewhere to join the other Firm members in prison.
Once he was in prison Chris Lambrianou was seen by Ralph Haeems, still choreographing the Krays’ defences. And he was horrified to hear Haeems tell him they wished him to say there had been no party at Carol Skinner’s on the night McVitie was killed. It was clear that Haeems was acting in the Krays’ best interests and not those of his other clients. When Lambrianou later discussed it with the Twins he was told, ‘It was a party that never happened. Don’t even think it did.’ And foolishly he agreed to go along with the story.12 Later he would write to the Court of Appeal saying that with his brother Tony in Brixton with the Twins, he had been afraid to do anything which might harm him.
Charged on 19 September with the murder of McVitie, Ronnie Kray replied, ‘Your sarcastic insinuations are far too obnoxious to be appreciated.’ Reggie merely said ‘Not guilty’. On 10 October Sammy Lederman and Micky Fawcett were discharged on the fraud charges. And five days later Lissack, acting for Donoghue, put the boot in by having the reporting restrictions lifted in the McVitie case. A week later on 22 October, the Twins were committed to stand trial at the Old Bailey on the McVitie charge. By now Freddie Foreman had been arrested and he also was committed for trial.
Leonard Read Nipper, The Man who Caught the Krays.
Chris Lambrianou, Escape from the Kray Madness. Tony Maffia was a friend of the safebreaker and prison escaper Alfie Hinds whom he helped to escape from the Law Courts in 1957. Maffia gained his nickname because of the amount of stolen goods he hoarded. On 27 May 1968 he was shot dead in Essex. Stephen Jewell from Manchester was convicted of his murder on a 10-2 majority decision. He has continually protested his innocence. James Morton, Gangland.
Leonard Read, Nipper, The Man who Caught the Krays, pp. 172-5.
Leonard Read Nipper, The Man who Caught the Krays.
Conversation with JM, 16 September 2009.
Leonard Read Nipper, The Man who Caught the Krays.
Laurie O’Leary, Reg Kray: A Way of Life, pp. 8-9.
Nat. Arch. MEPO 2/11411. His employers did not prosecute Terence Hart after he agreed to repay the money on a weekly basis.
Chris Lambrianou, Escape from the Kray Madness, pp. 150-151.
Chapter 14
The First Kray Trial
In the late autumn of 1968, with the Twins and cohorts finally committed for trial, the prosecution was tidying up its case. Junior counsel John Leonard wa
s advising what evidence needed bolstering, what further statements should be taken and what witnesses should be called. Despite Bobby Teale’s later claims that he and his brothers brought down the Krays, by October, Leonard did not think there was any point in calling him at that stage.13
As for the defence, after the committal proceedings it was time to give notice of alibi witnesses. Until the Criminal Justice Act 1967 the prosecution had no idea whether a defendant was going to call an alibi and if so, who DPP the witnesses might be. If, for example, the defendant said he had been at Walthamstow dogs on the night of the robbery or whatever, the Act now gave the police the chance to check that at least the animals had actually run that evening.
Things had changed with the introduction of the Act and, if an alibi was to be called, details of witnesses had to be given to the prosecution within seven days of the committal proceedings, and the police were to be allowed to interview them to test their stories. There were fears among lawyers that this would frighten off the witnesses and no half-way decent lawyer would allow his alibi witnesses to be seen without a senior member of his firm being present. Even then the interviews could often be described as ‘heavy’. There were also fears that the police would see the witnesses a second time without a defence lawyer being present, and so have two bites at the cherry.
In fact it was the first bite which caused problems for Fryde and Haeems. The latter wrote to the DPP telling him that Ronnie Kray’s defence would be that at the time of the Cornell shooting he was in The Lion in Tapp Street with, among others, John Dickson, Sammy Lederman and Robert Buckley. Unfortunately John Dickson had already seen Henry Mooney on 17 August in Wandsworth prison and had told him he had driven Kray to the Blind Beggar.
When Lederman was interviewed with Haeems present, he said he had been at home with his father and not in The Lion, ‘much to the dismay of Haeems’, noted Mooney delightedly. Nor was Buckley, who by this time was serving his four-year sentence for robbery, any great help. He had already told Mooney he had been in The Lion and said that he would not be giving evidence. He was, he said, terrified of the Twins. If called as a witness, he said he would tell the truth.
On 9 September 1968 Henry Mooney telephoned Haeems to make an appointment to see the alibi witnesses Lederman and Bobby Buckley. Initially Haeems refused but after taking counsel’s advice eventually agreed to the meeting. When Buckley said he would only tell the truth and was saying nothing more, Haeems told Mooney this indeed confirmed he was sticking to the alibi he was providing for Ronnie. It was a serious miscalculation.
In the 1960s, murder trials were presided over by what were called ‘red judges’ from the High Court, so called because of the colour of their robes. None of the lawyers acting for the defendants can have been that pleased to learn that the red judge in this case would be the acerbic and autocratic Mr Justice Melford Stevenson. A man who cut a Nietzschean figure as he posed when he came into court, barristers almost knocked their heads on the bench in front of them as they tried to bow lower than their colleagues. Generally hated by defendants for the lengthy sentences he handed out and the comments he made, he once sentenced a 19-year-old to Borstal training on his first offence, saying he hoped ‘no soft-hearted official will recommend your early release’.
He was, wrote the Appeal Court judge Sir Robin Dunne in his memoirs Sword and Wig, ‘the worst judge since the war’ – and Stevenson had faced stiff opposition to achieve that particular accolade. Very pro-police, he lived near Winchester in a house named ‘Truncheons’.14 It was to be a trial in which the defence could expect little in the way of discretion exercised in their favour.
Kenneth Jones would lead for the prosecution. By no means the roughest of prosecutors of his generation, Jones, the overweight Recorder of Wolverhampton, had the reputation for meticulous preparation along with the ability both to cross-examine and to appeal to juries. He would lead ex-Guards officer John Leonard and the vastly overweight Caesar James Crespi, a man said to be able to eat eighteen Wimpeys at a sitting.
Meanwhile it was time to instruct barristers to appear for the various defendants. Generally the burden of the defence case falls on the shoulders of the barrister appearing for the defendant first named in the indictment. That defendant was Ronnie Kray. There was logic in this from the point of view of the prosecution. Cornell’s was the first murder chronologically, and was said to have been committed by Ronnie. It would, however, have been far better from the defence point of view if Reggie had been named first. Then it would have been the incisive Paul Wrightson QC, who had prosecuted Reggie in the 1969 Podro blackmail case, who would have had first crack at the witnesses and would have borne the brunt of the inevitable quarrels with Melford Stevenson. As it was defendants often believe in luck and Wrightson, albeit with considerable unrequested help from Manny Fryde, had achieved an acquittal for Reggie in the Hide-A-Way case. Reggie now regarded him as a talisman and wanted to keep him for himself. Curiously, Petre Crowder, who had appeared for Ronnie in that case, was shuffled down the pack.
Quite why Fryde chose the New Zealander John Platts-Mills QC for Ronnie remains something of a mystery. For a start, Platts-Mills’ politics fell into Stevenson’s category of major dislikes. This 63-year-old tall, distinguished-looking man of infinite kindness was a former socialist MP who had been a conscientious objector during the War, working as a Bevin Boy. He was still a committed left-winger. It was not something likely to appeal to Stevenson, who said of him maliciously, ‘he helps solicitors on with their coats like Father D’Arcy elevating the host.’
One barrister who was with Platts-Mills in another case told me:
‘He was a Stalinist, humourless and dull, but he had moral courage in spades and was utterly fearless in advancing his clients’ defences, quite regardless of how unpopular they might have been, and he was utterly unmoved by judicial hostility. Exactly what a barrister should be. But not everybody was so fastidious about the duty to the client.’15
But, fatally for the defence, Platts-Mills, who had appeared for Charlie Richardson two years earlier, was not a man who could ask a straight question. Instead he had an alarming tendency to go off on tangents. In his opening speech in the Cornell trial he took time out to give the jury the definition of the word ‘juggernaut’:
‘I am not sure that I remember exactly what a juggernaut was. I think it was a great chariot in an ancient, barbaric, pagan religious festival, where Bacchanalia of a sort, drunken old men roared in stupor on a chariot and drunken young women danced with them, and as it dragged forward in ecstasy or hysteria people were thrown under the wheels or threw themselves under the wheels in religious fervour.’
Another good, if shorter, example of this came in his questioning of Alfie Teale, a prosecution witness in the later Mitchell trial, over the name of a public house in the East End:
Q. ‘The Grave Maurice, the Graf meaning Prince Maurice, the brother of Prince Rupert?’
A. ‘The Grave Maurice, I know it as.’
He led the rising star Ivan Lawrence, who would go on to be a Conservative MP. Charlie was represented by the rough and tough Desmond Vowden QC; Tom Williams QC and Ivor Richards appeared for Freddie Foreman. Chris Lambrianou was represented by Petre Crowder QC, along with Patrick Pakenham, the son of Lord Longford. Pakenham was one of the more flamboyant of the juniors and on one occasion was asked why he was wearing Union Jack socks. ‘To give the middle classes something to talk about,’ was the reply. Donoghue was represented by another Conservative MP Edward Gardiner QC, along with Evan Stone.
The dissolute and gold-bedecked Sir Lionel Tennyson Thompson appeared for both Tommy Cowley and Connie Whitehead. The last in the line to inherit the baronetcy created for the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, stories of the louche barrister abounded. One was that a barrister chanced upon him drinking champagne alone in a wine bar in Westminster. ‘Sit down, Smith. Have a drink,’ he said, ‘I’m celebrating. Mother’s de
ad’.
In long trials judges often pick on one particular counsel as their butt, usually a junior counsel if all the others are QCs, and Thompson served that purpose for Melford Stevenson, who called him ‘Mr Thomas’ and, when corrected, ‘Sir Thompson’ before Platts-Mills intervened and said the proper address was ‘Sir Lionel’. Stevenson was quite capable of this sort of mockery. He once referred to another barrister, Michael Beckman, as Mr Bechstein. Beckman retorted, ‘I may be Jewish, my Lord, but I am not a grand piano.’
Also on parade for the defence were the austere William Howard QC, who once criticised a junior barrister for wearing a purple shirt in court. The Recorder of Leeds, Rudolph Lyons QC, appeared for Ronnie Bender.
The fly in the defence ointment, however, would be the very talented, garrulous, gossipy Barry Hudson QC who had been a top-class athlete in the 1930s and had narrowly missed selection for the Berlin Olympics. Known as the ‘GIs’ QC’ after he had represented American servicemen in eleven courts martial over an 18-month period, he appeared for Anthony Barry, instructed by Bernie Perkoff.
On 3 December, Paul Wrightson suggested to the DPP that the Twins might plead guilty to certain charges – but not to the murders – if Charlie was allowed to go free. At a meeting between Treasury Counsel, DPP’s man David Hopkin and Read, it was decided that it would be a question of all or nothing.
Read recalled:
‘There’s an entry note in my notebook, “Let’s fight it all the way.” If we had accepted a plea it would have seemed to undermine the enormity of the charges. I wanted Charlie to be convicted. My mistake was to have left him out of the Hide-A-Way. It might have prejudiced my thinking. I would have had an input but the end decision was up to Jones and Leonard.’16