by James Morton
After the mauling Ronnie and his witnesses had received, his brothers had learned their lessons. Reggie Kray made a statement from the dock denying he had killed McVitie or that Connie Whitehead was in fear of him.
‘I would like to say the evidence against me is a pack of lies and I accuse Mr Read of being a liar in two instances and I would wish to show the jury the scar which has been indicated in evidence [Read had said he had two scars when Reggie only had one].’
Now he told the jury that young Connie had been at Violet Kray’s place over the weekends. Kray also read out a long sub-Pam-Ayres-style poem he had written and sent to Whitehead’s little boy.
‘Connie is bright and bonnie
with mischief in his eyes,
a saucy smile,
he stood and pondered for a while
I mustn’t tell lies
yet I must go out to play
thought little Connie:
“wonder what I can say”.’
And so on ad nauseam.
Kray also read out two letters, one he had written to his parents and a second from Mrs Whitehead written on 15 August the previous year when he was in custody. He then called on his boyhood mentor, the faithful Father Hetherington. The pastor had only come to court because he had read reports in the papers. Little Connie and Mrs Whitehead were not frightened of Reggie, and indeed Connie was fond of him. Reggie Kray made no mention of McVitie’s murder nor of being an accessory to the murder of Cornell.
Charlie Kray said nothing, advised, he said later, by Desmond Vowden not to give evidence. Memory both fades and is enhanced. In his book Me and My Brothers he complained about how unfairly and rudely Judge Stevenson had treated his Auntie May Filler: ‘abominably with a total lack of respect’. However, the transcript of the trial shows Stevenson made no comment to her during her evidence.
Charlie’s big point was that John Dickson had said he had been with him in one of the Pellicci cafés on a Sunday morning but when Pellicci was called, he said he had not opened either café on a Sunday for the past 17 years. There was, however, at least one other café in the area which did open on a Sunday. Charlie believed this was evidence Dickson had lied on oath. According to Kray, ‘Dickson’s jaw dropped’. In fact he was not even in court. It was during the summing-up that Stevenson put things right so far as the prosecution was concerned, saying if it could not have been the Sunday it must have been the Monday.
Ian Barrie made a statement from the dock denying he had killed Cornell.
Now the trial was moving more speedily. On 5 February, taking Petre Crowder by surprise, Chris Lambrianou suddenly decided to give evidence.25
That day both the Lambrianous and Ronnie Bender were in the witness box. So far as the brothers were concerned their defence was a complete denial that they had been at the flat when McVitie was killed. Chris Lambrianou had been with a girl he had met at Euston Station. He had not met McVitie that night. The reason Carol Skinner was telling lies about him was that Skinner blamed him for the break-up of her marriage. Lambrianou claimed she had never seen him carrying a bowl of blood and pouring it down the lavatory. ‘She has been watching too many Dracula films… It is a wonder she did not say I drank it as well.’ He was never used as bait to get McVitie to the Evering Road flat. Read had fabricated the case against him.
Tony Lambrianou claimed, ‘I don’t believe he is dead for one minute.’ Indeed he had seen McVitie in Sainsbury’s in the Balls Pond Road around the Christmas after the murder was meant to have taken place. He had not been to the flat that night. He also was being framed.
Nor had Ronnie Bender been there that night. In fact he had been with his girlfriend ‘Mrs S’, Bubbles Shea, Frankie Shea’s former girlfriend, at the Greyhounds before moving on to the Regency, which he left around 2.30 a.m. He had seen Hart there who had invited him to go to a party, but he had refused. Indeed, Hart was probably the actual killer. He had rowed with Hart, which was why the man was giving evidence against him.
Freddie Foreman denied Hart and Charlie Kray had come to the Prince of Wales to get him to dispose of McVitie’s body and the Mini. He had once ordered Hart to leave his 211 Club in front of two girls and this was the reason he was giving evidence against him. He called witnesses who said they were in the public bar of the Prince of Wales courting until around 4 a.m. and had not heard Hart and Kray outside. In his evidence he told the jury that he had known the Krays, whom he described as ‘nice people’, for about ten years, but he had not known McVitie. How he could reconcile this with having once ordered him out of his club is difficult to understand.
However, just as the prosecution intended, things were spoiled by the Regency’s Anthony Barry, who gave evidence of the pressure he had been under from the Krays and how he had not dared to disobey their order to bring the gun to Evering Road. Worse, Hart, when cross-examined by Hudson, had told the jury that Barry had been forced to pay £50 protection money to the Firm after Albert Donoghue broke down doors in the club and beat up the barman. Platts-Mills tried to intervene but was told by Stevenson the questioning was proper. If Hart was to be believed about the killings, then he would also be believed about the pressure the Krays put on Barry. John Dickson supported this:
‘You have got the three Krays in the dock, and that is the only reason why I have come forward. If you had one of them out, you would not get me to give evidence, you would get no witnesses, for if you had one of them out, you would find he would terrorise the life out of them.’26
Platts-Mills did what he could in the closing speech he made for Ronnie Kray, so much so that according to Eric Crowther, the stipendiary magistrate, a note was passed to junior counsel for onward transmission, reading, ‘Well done, my boy. Keep it up. If you carry on like this you’ll get promotion,’ signed The Colonel.27
In those days there was no question of juries deliberating for weeks on end. It was reckoned that a verdict in the first two hours would be for the prosecution; in the second two hours it would be for the defence; and after that it would more likely be in favour of the prosecution. The jury retired at a quarter past 12 and returned shortly after seven in the evening with guilty verdicts for all except Anthony Barry, who was acquitted.
The next day, the barmaid and the jury returned to listen to the sentencing from Stevenson which was, as might have been expected, swingeing. Life for Ronnie and Reggie with a recommended minimum of 30 years and the famous words, ‘Society has earned a rest from you’. Life with a recommended minimum of 20 for Ian Barrie, the Lambrianou brothers and Ronnie Bender. Ten apiece for Charlie Kray – who had been expecting, if not an acquittal, then three or four years – and for Freddie Foreman for assisting in the disposal of McVitie’s body; and seven for Connie Whitehead for helping clear up. Not that it mattered, but Reggie received ten for assisting Ronnie after he had killed Cornell. That would be concurrent.
Donoghue was then brought up for sentencing and was duly rewarded for his co-operation. He received two years, which meant he also had only a few weeks left to serve.
Would things have been any better if Platts-Mills had run the defence he wanted, and argued that a mentally-ill Ronnie was the dominant brother, with Reggie acting under duress? It would certainly not have been a defence which appealed to Melford Stevenson. In any event, to run a defence of duress as Anthony Barry did, Paul Wrightson would have had to show that the danger to him and his family was imminent and that he had no opportunity to seek the help of the police. The first part that Ronnie was mentally sick had possibilities, but duress for Reggie was never a runner, even if he had agreed to go along with it. Curiously, the gentle, if sometimes naïve Platts-Mills, who thought the Twins would have been acquitted if Stevenson had split the Cornell and McVitie trials, later wrote, ‘I genuinely believed they were not guilty,’ always a dangerous thing for a legal representative to believe.28
And so the long road to the canonisation and
, in time, the beatification of the Krays began. But again there were many more difficulties along that road.
Nat. Arch. DPP 2/4583; Robert Teale, Bringing Down the Krays.
Hugh Massingberd (ed), ‘Sir Melford Stevenson’, The Very Best of the Daily Telegraph Books of Obituaries, pp. 31-34.
Conversation with JM, 4 February 2014.
Leonard Read Nipper, The Man who Caught the Krays.
HO 3336; 11 December 1968.
Nat. Arch. Crim. 8/39.
Nat. Arch. Crim. 1/1543
Chris Lambrianou, Escape from the Kray Madness, pp. 160-161.
Reg & Ron Kray, Our Story, p. 98.
Nat. Arch. Transcript of Summing up, J 82/1332.
Nat. Arch. J 82/1328.
John Platts-Mills, Muck, Silk and Socialism : recollections of a left-wing Queen’s Counsel, pp. 469-471.
Nat. Arch. J 82/1330.
Quoted in Ernest Millen, Specialist in Crime, p. 260.
Eric Crowther, Last in the List, p. 231.
John Platts-Mills, Muck, Silk and Socialism: recollections of a left-wing Queen’s Counsel, pp. 469-471.
Chapter 15
The Mitchell Trial and
the Split in the Firm
As soon as the sentences had been passed on the Firm, the prosecution counsel Kenneth Jones called a conference to decide what was to be done about the Frank Mitchell case. It was decided to recharge Charlie Kray and to charge Freddie Foreman with the murder. A week later Manny Fryde made an offer of pleas from his clients to harbouring and conspiracy if the murder charge against Charlie could be dropped. Charlie would also make a statement. The offer was declined.
The second trial began on 15 April 1969 before Mr Justice Lawton. Before it, perhaps inadvisedly, and certainly to the annoyance of prosecuting counsel Kenneth Jones and John Leonard, Nipper Read threw a party on Saturday 23 March 1969 at the Mount Pleasant Hotel in Calthorpe Street for the jurors in the first trial to meet their bodyguards. The hosts were nominally the officers (paying 25 shillings a head). Eleven jurors were present. The twelfth had had a heart attack a week before the party. There were complaints by the civil liberties lawyer Benedict Birnberg suggesting this might even be contempt of court. If the police could throw a party for the jury, why not a successful defendant?29
Mr Justice Lawton’s father had been a deeply disliked prison governor whom Frank Fraser claimed in Mad Frank, and with some evidence to back his story, to have tried to hang as he walked his dog on Wandsworth Common. Early in his own career Lawton had been a member of the British Fascist Party. That had been forgiven if not forgotten, and Lawton was a much more jovial judge than Stevenson. Summing up he described the defendants as ‘not angels, not even perhaps demoted saints’ and, questioning Read about Albert Donoghue, he asked if he was in the First Division of informers (there was then no Premier Division):
Read: ‘I would put him in the bottom half of the First Division.’
Lawton: ‘He will have to keep his eye on relegation.’
Despite this apparent amiability, once again the defendants could expect no sympathy. Lawton was neither a notably lenient nor a tolerant judge. However, the immediate problem was, given the amount of publicity following their convictions and sentences in the first trial, could the Krays get a fair hearing?
John Platts-Mills, again appearing for Ronnie, asked the judge to invite the prosecution to drop the entire proceedings. Naturally that met with little sympathy and so he applied for leave to challenge the jury for cause, in this case bias. His argument was that every single juror among the 250 who had been assembled should be disqualified because of what they had read and heard. His problem was that in English law a challenge for cause cannot be made unless there is some basis for the challenge before questioning the juror on his or her views.
Lawton believed:
‘The reporting of trials which take place in open court is an important part of the functions of a newspaper and it would not be in the public interest, in my judgement, if newspapers desisted from reporting trials, and from reporting verdicts and sentences in those trials merely because there was some indictment still to be dealt with.’30
Now he found a half-way house. He accepted that some of the newspapers had gone into such background detail that if a potential juror had read them then he might be prejudiced. Platts-Mills could examine the jurors on that basis. He did and a number of them were rejected.
When the trial finally began, Reggie, Ronnie and Charlie Kray along with Frederick Foreman were in the dock charged with Mitchell’s murder. With them were Wallace Garelick, Patrick Connolly, Thomas Cowley and Connie Whitehead, variously charged with conspiracy and harbouring. Absent were Teddy Smith and Ronald Olliffe, who had both disappeared. Others who perhaps might have been in the dock were the fearsome Alfie Gerard and his close friend Jeremiah Callaghan. They had very sensibly left for Australia after being involved in an attack on a Salvation Army worker Gwyneth Redhead in January 1968 and were not retrieved until after the end of this current trial.31 Now, Cowley, Whitehead and Garelick wanted to change their pleas and Whitehead and Cowley pleaded guilty to harbouring and a plea of not guilty to accessory after the fact to the murder charge, and the Crown agreed. Whitehead had seven convictions, including, of course, the seven years he received for being an accessory after the death of McVitie. Tommy Cowley had convictions for receiving stolen coins and for housebreaking. Lawton said that he would have taken a much less lenient view of John Dickson, who had only been sentenced to nine months in the first trial, but he felt he was morally bound by Stevenson’s sentencing. They also would each receive nine months. Could it, asked Sir Lionel Thompson, be made concurrent with Whitehead’s seven years? No, it could not and nor, when Garelick, a man with no previous convictions, pleaded guilty to helping in the escape, could he have bail until he was sentenced.
The principal witness for the prosecution was now Albert Donoghue, a taciturn and, many thought, uncharismatic man. He nevertheless stood up well to cross-examination, denying Ronnie Kray’s version that he had accidentally shot Mitchell while the Axeman was being handed over to some Cypriots who had arranged to take him out of the country.32 He denied Foreman’s allegations that he had been taking protection money from him. Quite the reverse. ‘He was part of the Firm and I used to go to him regularly to give him his whack of the protection money.’ Donoghue said that Jerry Callaghan opened the back door of the van, and he and Mitchell got in. Foreman had told him to sit with Ronnie Olliffe, who was driving, and tell him the best way to get to the Blackwall Tunnel. Gerard and Foreman then opened fire.
The defences were complicated. First, there was still the possibility Mitchell was alive and Platts-Mills suggested that he might have been the man who had pulled a woman’s car out of the mud in County Clare the summer after he was alleged to have been shot. Billy Exley denied that in 1968 he had told the armed robber, Panayiotis Georgiades, that Mitchell was in Hamburg making his way to Cannes. What he did damagingly tell the jury was that the day after the party held after Mitchell’s disappearance, when Teddy Smith organised a further clean up, he (Exley) took Mitchell’s wireless and broke it up. Worse, telling Exley they were all in it together, Reggie wanted him to kill Lisa. He had replied, ‘Fuck off. I ain’t in anything.’ Even as late as 1990 Reg Kray was insisting that Exley and three Greeks had killed Mitchell.33
At the end of the prosecution case, with no evidence that they had been involved, the charges of murder against Ronnie and Charlie Kray were dismissed.
Foreman called an alibi that on 23 December he had been at a London nursing home visiting his wife, Maureen, who had had an appendectomy that week and was due for discharge the next day. While there he had particularly noticed a nurses’ party… A Dr Barry gave evidence that he had taken out Maureen Foreman’s stitches and given her an injection of morphine but he had no notes on times or dates. A crucial question was the nurses’ party attended by surgeons and
one of the only two days a year they were allowed to have alcoholic drink in the hospital. This, said the matron, was on the 22nd. The question was whether there had been an informal and unauthorised party on the 23rd. The matron said this was impossible.
The prosecution then called rebutting evidence to show the nurses’ party had been the night before. Maureen Foreman told the court she had flown to Australia to try to trace the nurse who had looked after her but had been unsuccessful.
There was also the question of the driver of the van in which it was alleged Mitchell had been shot. Ronnie Olliffe had completely disappeared and an oblique alibi was called in his case. If it could be shown he was not the driver on 23 December when Mitchell was taken away, then Donoghue’s story could not be relied on. As a result Foreman must be innocent. Witnesses, including the former boxer Terry Spinks, came forward to say they had been with Olliffe that night at the Log Cabin, the drinking club in Wardour Street frequented mainly by criminals.
When he began summing up on 14 May after lengthy speeches by counsel, Lawton, who could not understand how Mitchell had effectively had the run of Dartmoor, was clearly getting testy: