Krays- the Final Word

by James Morton

  Ince’s second trial began four days later and this time the judge was the far more approachable Mr Justice Eveleigh, the antithesis of Stevenson, who actually believed Ince was not guilty. During the second trial the question of the killer’s accent, described as a Yorkshire one, was brought up but Beverley Patience remained certain that she had correctly identified Ince.

  On 18 May, the fifth day of the second trial, Ince’s defence began. On the evening of the murder he had been with a Mrs Grey at an address which he was allowed to write down. If correct, this put Ince more than 60 miles from the Barn only 90 minutes before the murder.

  Mrs Grey was in fact still Charlie Kray’s wife, and it was to protect her from her husband and his family that Ince had not called her during the first trial. When Charlie was told she was coming on a visit to tell him she was going to give evidence, extra security was arranged. Kray wanted to know if Ince had some sort of hold over her but she told him her story true and he had been with her the night of the murder.

  The prosecution wanted Mrs Grey’s true identity known to the court, but they were only allowed to be told that she had changed her name.

  After a three-hour retirement the jury found Ince not guilty. In August 1973 the northerner John Brook and Nicholas Johnson were charged with the murder and in February 1974 Brook was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment and Johnson was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years.

  Poor Dolly. After the hearing, Violet Kray told reporters, ‘I never liked Charlie’s wife but now I hate her. The family has cut her off completely.’ Dolly Kray received £20,000 from a newspaper for the story of her involvement with Ince. She told Charlie her relationship with Ince was over, but in turn he told her their marriage was finished. Ince had a hard time in prison and while he was serving his sentence in Long Lartin over a bullion robbery he was slashed by Harry ‘Hate-em-all’ Johnston, then serving 18 years. True to the Samurai’s code, when Ince was asked at Evesham Magistrates’ Court to identify Johnston, he replied, ‘I wouldn’t like to take a chance on identifying anyone. You know what I think of Identification Parades.’ Johnston still received five years. He was said to have been given a Rolex gold watch by the Twins as a reward for the cutting.40

  Dolly may no longer have been in love with her husband but she was still supportive, lobbying for more visits and pleading for him to be moved from the Special Security wing in Chelmsford to the general prison population. In its turn the Home Office told her he was getting more privileges than most.

  Charlie had two sets of home leave, during the latter of which, together with his parents, he went to see his brothers in Parkhurst. That evening Violet threw a welcome home party at the Blue Coat Boy pub in Bishopsgate where she now worked. He was denied parole in July 1974.41

  On 5 January 1975 Charlie Kray was released and left Maidstone prison under a cloud of death threats. The big question is just what did Kray do after that? Perhaps he would return to his career as a theatrical agent? It seemed not: in March 1975 Kray said he was opening a restaurant in the country where he would be a meeter and greeter.

  He was certainly used as a meeter and greeter in the Gallipolli restaurant in Bishopsgate, and there were plans for him to be the front man in Kray’s Casino, a restaurant-cum-club in Benidorm, which was to be financed partly by Colombian interests. It fell through when the local authorities kept upping their demands for licence fees. He managed a pop group and sold cutlery at the Ideal Home Exhibition. For a time he was a consultant for J. Levisky & Associates, ‘Registered bailiffs to the County Courts, Debt Investigation for DTI, Customs and Excise etc.’ In time the theatrical agencies he ran were wound up, as was a clothing and makeup factory which owed £5,671.

  He borrowed money from all and sundry, including £2,000 from the landlord of the Blue Coat Boy. It was never repaid.

  He had interests in clubs throughout England and the police believed he was also dealing in counterfeit videos and amphetamines. Some old officers still believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he was the brains behind the Firm.

  There were rumours he derived some of his income from informing. One Eastender recalled in a conversation with me:

  ‘Billy Rees stole an articulated lorry and his usual receiver, saying he could not handle such a big vehicle, recommended him to Charlie Kray. Kray told him to drive the vehicle to a lock-up behind the billiard hall in the Mile End Road where the police were waiting.’

  Apologists for him take the view that he was a good-looking wastrel who lived off handouts from former friends and such small deals as he could put together. The wife of one East Ender recalls that after his release:

  ‘Charlie was a sponger. That’s what he did all his life. He’d borrow and never repay. Then he’d borrow say £100 and use the money to buy all the ladies in a club a flower each.’42

  Others discount the brains theory. Nipper Read, giving some weight to the sponger theory, believed, ‘All he had to say was that he was Charlie Kray. People looked over his shoulder and wondered where the Twins were.’

  Other police officers believed there was more to Charlie than his public image. Six months after his release, a DCI Price wrote in an internal memorandum dated 3 July 1975 that he thought Charlie was associating with professional criminals and ‘is believed to be organising criminal activities of a serious nature’. He asked for copies of mail and visitor details for the Twins.

  By 1986 Charlie was running Krayleigh Enterprises, a bodyguard service, advertised as ‘Personal Aides to the Hollywood Stars and Arab Noblemen’. In October that year his book Me and My Brothers was published.

  Charlie was never long out of the news. In October 1976 he was out with his fiancée Diane Buffini, when his North London flat was burgled and cash and jewellery worth about £2,000 was stolen. In April 1978 she was refused permission to visit the Twins.

  One of the ‘criminal activities of a serious nature’ was the contract killing of Barbara Gaul, the estranged wife of the Maltese-born property millionaire John Gaul, shot and killed outside the Black Lion Hotel, Patcham, in Sussex on 12 January 1977. She had been visiting her daughter Samantha.

  Since the shotgun used to kill her had been dropped from a car window, it was not difficult to track the actual murderers down. They were brothers Roy and Keith Edgeler from Norfolk, who were jailed on 24 June 1976.

  In a contract killing it is desirable if not essential to place several layers between the hirer and the killer, and the firm belief in the underworld was that it was Charlie Kray who had approached the Edgelers.43

  By the mid 1980s the Krays were almost certainly making more money than they had done on the outside, with up to £3,000 a week coming from the sale of authentic Kray T-shirts and other memorabilia, and fees, said to be £1,000 a time, payable to Charlie for the privilege of an audience with one of the captive Twins.

  In 1970 Performance was released, starring James Fox and Mick Jagger. The following year saw Richard Burton appearing in Villain, both films very loosely based on the Kray story. In 1981 Robert Duval, fresh from critical acclaim as the detective in True Confessions, had said he would like to play Ronnie Kray and hoped Bob Hoskins would play Reggie. If need be he would be prepared to live in the East End for six months to acquire the accent.44

  Nothing came of it, but what really projected the Krays onto the public screen and sealed their oxymoronic temporary immortality was the casting of Spandau Ballet brothers Gary and Martin Kemp in The Krays. Gary was Ronnie and Martin played Reggie. Billie Whitelaw and Alfred Lynch played their parents. Stephen Berkoff was George Cornell, but there was criticism that Tom Bell was too fragile and sympathetic as McVitie. Charlie was written out of the script. Despite these criticisms it was an enormous success.

  The fee paid to Charlie was £250,000, to be divided equally between the three of them. Additionally Charlie organised a £10,000 sweetener for himself b
y signing away all his and the Twins’ future profits from the movie. It was not an astute move. First, it alienated him from his brothers and secondly, given the movie and other rights grossed £10 million, Charlie had signed away literally hundreds of thousands of pounds in exchange for a quick buck. Even worse, the Twins were very protective of their mother’s image. She did not swear and they were furious that Charlie had allowed ‘bollocks’ to be the first word spoken by Billie Whitelaw. His brothers did not speak to him for the better part of a year.

  However, there were other earners to come. A computer game called The Firm was marketed, and Charlie’s company Krayleigh Security began to provide doormen for clubs countrywide.

  When Frank Sinatra Junior visitied England after his 1983 kidnapping, Krayleigh looked after him, as well as providing an 18-strong bodyguard for his father at Wimbledon in June 1985.

  In 1984 there was more unwelcome publicity for Charlie, when Dolly’s brother, Ray Moore, was shot and killed outside his house in south London during a domestic incident.

  Seven years later in October 1991 Kray was in the news again when his driver and bodyguard Bruce Bryan was stabbed to death in Stocks Nightclub on the King’s Road, Chelsea. How the now unemployed and seemingly unemployable Charlie could afford a chauffeur and bodyguard was never satisfactorily explained. Ronnie O’Sullivan senior, father of the world snooker champion, was said to have serviced Charlie Kray’s car. O’Sullivan Snr was jailed for life for Bryan’s killing. Bryan had been in the club with Charlie’s one-time girlfriend Angela Mills and according to the prosecution evidence, O’Sullivan and a certain Edward O’Brien had been shouting racist taunts and singing football songs. A fight broke out and O’Sullivan stabbed Bryan with a hunting knife after being hit with a champagne bottle. O’Sullivan claimed mistaken identity but was convicted nevertheless. Charlie declined to give evidence on his behalf.

  Kray’s name surfaced yet again in 1994 when millionaire businessman Donald Urquhart was gunned down after drinking with his girlfriend at the Queen’s Head in Marylebone High Street on 2 January. A man, said to have been red or fair-haired, had ridden up on a 250cc Yamaha motorbike and shot him.

  It was clearly another contract killing and Charlie came under suspicion as the potential broker. He was arrested and questioned with tapes being played to him which allegedly implicated him. He refused, as was his right, to answer any questions. The death of Urquhart, a money launderer suspected of handling some of the proceeds of the Brink’s Mat robbery, was only partly solved. An unemployed roofer Graeme West was convicted of killing him for a fee of £20,000, but his employer was never disclosed. Charlie claimed that it was simply the Kray name which again was causing him trouble, and, with the help of his publisher Robin McGibbon, he appeared on a couple of television shows in an effort to prove it.

  By now he had separated from his girlfriend, the long-suffering Diane Buffini. He had been involved in a relationship with her during his marriage to Dolly, and after his release from prison, a friend traced her for him. By then she had married Daniel Buffini, but this marriage was in difficulties and now they set up light housekeeping together in what he says was an open relationship. The split with Dolly had been acrimonious and his son Gary had at one time gone to live with his grandfather before moving to Blackpool to help out at a hotel. Their daughter Nancy had remained with her mother. Now Diane was not prepared to tolerate another long-term affair, this time with middle-aged Judy Stanley, the daughter of a head teacher. Stanley had met Charlie in a restaurant run by Diane when her 14-year-old marriage was breaking up. ‘He has a powerful presence – I suppose some would say an aura of danger – which I find sexy,’ she told reporter Sheron (sic) Boyle. Charlie thought he ‘could not bear not having Judy in my life… I was even more in love with Judy and knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her and her children.’45

  In January 1996 Gary was diagnosed with lung cancer. He spent some time in a hospice and was taken to Maidstone to see Uncle Reg in a farewell visit. Charlie contacted Dolly, and after a long absence Nancy came to see her brother in the hospice. She was welcomed but Kray’s relations with Dolly had not improved and he claimed that some years earlier she had evicted Gary so that George Ince could move in with her.

  Gary’s funeral at St Matthews Church, Chingford, conducted by the Reverend Kenneth Rimini, was paid for by Reggie, who sent a tape to be played, and the cortege of seven limousines included an empty one, directly behind the hearse, symbolising his absence. The congregation filed out to Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always love you’. Gary was buried in the same grave as Frances Kray. Dolly did not attend.

  Then on 31 July 1996 came a bolt from the blue: Charlie was arrested over a £39 million drug deal and was charged with conspiracy to sell cocaine to undercover officers. Kray watchers could not believe it and the charge was greeted with ridicule among the underworld, who regarded him as a pathetic old man trading off the names of his younger brothers for handouts for old times’ sake. He had been, they pointed out, unable to pay for his son’s funeral. There were confident predictions of an acquittal.

  Despite efforts by his friends to wean him from Ralph Haeems with suggestions of other solicitors, the umbilical cord was too strong to cut and Charlie went again to him for his defence.

  The evidence was that Charlie Kray’s name had been heard on police intercept tapes, and when Scotland Yard set up a police undercover operation, senior officers were worried that the supposedly ultra-cautious Kray and his friends would be wary of anyone with a London accent. Detectives from the North were therefore brought in to act as ‘buyers’.

  The police believed Charlie was still deeply involved in the underworld who had been investigated on at least three occasions. There were unproven allegations linking him to amphetamines, counterfeit videos and fake coins. He had neither a bank account nor a credit card. He never claimed benefit. This, said the police, showed that he was still an operator to be reckoned with. Charlie countered by saying he sponged off people, including his new love Judy Stanley.

  In Me and My Brothers, Kray’s version of what had happened was that, financially bust to the wide, and devastated by his son’s death, shortly after Gary’s funeral he had accepted an invitation from Big Albert, a friend in Birmingham, for him and Judy to go, all expenses paid, to stay a couple of days in the city. On 9 May there was another call, this time from Patsy Manning, saying that there was another party for his (Patsy’s) 60th birthday being thrown by Big Albert. This time he went to Birmingham without Judy and stayed at the Wake Green Lodge hotel in Moseley, comped by the owner. At the bar that evening along with Manning were George, whom he had met at Gary’s funeral, another man Deano, and a third man Jack from Newcastle, who joined them later. According to the writer Bernard O’Mahoney, Charlie had been out of his skull that evening, snorting cocaine with a £50 note and urging his friends to share a line with him. Charlie took the opportunity to touch Deano for a loan and over the next fortnight Jack kept in touch with him.46 The police sting had begun.

  In May Kray invited Jack to a benefit in a friend’s pub in Kent to raise money for the hospice where Gary had been cared for at the end of his life. Jack produced a football signed by the Newcastle United players to be raffled.

  At another benefit night in memory of Gary on 2 July at the Mermaid Theatre, Kray introduced Jack to his associates Ronnie Field, a builder from Raynes Park, south-west London, and Robert Gould, an electrician from Wimbledon.

  Eight days later Jack arranged for Field and Kray to fly to Newcastle to discuss business. There, Kray met Brian, another friend of Jack. And on 11 July there was another party, this time for Charlie’s 70th birthday. Now, again pleading poverty, he touched Jack for £500. This time he took Judy with him. Again they were comped at the Wake Green Hotel and Jack and Brian gave Charlie a gold cigarette lighter. The next he heard was when Jack telephoned him to ask Ronnie Field to call him. And, said Charlie, th
e next he knew about anything was that he had been arrested after he returned home from working on a new edition of Me and My Brothers.

  This was not a totally frank account by Charlie. The police had 20 tapes of him discussing drugs with his new friends. Jack, who was never identified and gave his evidence from behind a screen, had explained to Kray on the tapes that his supplier in Amsterdam had been ‘topped’ and that he was short of drugs. Could Kray assist? Charlie fell for the bait.

  Kray told him he had people who were ‘sat on a ton’ and he could ‘put Jack’s name on it’. Jack said, ‘That’s a lot of puff [cannabis].’ Kray then said, ‘I know it’s not the place, we will talk in the morning’. Jack said okay and they shook on it.

  Charlie had told him, ‘I put people together but I won’t go there when they do these things, because I have too many eyes on me.’ In subsequent conversations Kray offered to supply five kilos of 92% pure cocaine every fortnight for up to two years. The price was to be £31,500 a kilo. If the deal had gone ahead Kray and his associates would have grossed £8 million.

  According to Jack, finally a deal was arranged, with Kray shaking his hand with the words ‘Done, mate.’ But nothing happened immediately. Despite the pressure to complete, Kray kept delaying, claiming at one stage to have just lost £1 million on a deal.

  Finally drugs were handed over by Field and Gould at the Swallow Hotel, Waltham Abbey, in exchange for £63,000. The pair were followed and arrested near the Dartford Tunnel. Charlie was arrested later at his home in Sanderstead. Next day he was remanded in custody and sent to the high-security Belmarsh Prison, from where he wrote to his friends in the hope they would stand surety for him if he was granted bail. He was not.

  Kray’s defence was one of entrapment and that he was simply stringing the purchasers along in the hope of conning money from them. Two things militated against this. First, there was no doubt that one delivery of drugs had taken place and secondly, it was highly unlikely that the 70-year-old Kray would dare to try to pull off a multi-million-pound scam on top-class drug dealers. Death would have been almost instantaneous. His trouble was that, as with much of his career, he took chances, thinking the pot of gold was simply there for him to pick up. As Frank Fraser pointed out: